Title: Agile
Author: Andre Faria
Year: 2013
Pages: 165
Today, agile methodologies are one of the most efficient ways to guide a project from beginning to end without complications and with a constant focus on delivering value to the customer.
According to André Faria Gomes, renowned coach and team leader, Agile comes in different flavours.
In addition to showing how Kanban, XP, and Scrum can be used together, he also shows how to incorporate each method into his day-to-day work.
Having read the book in Portuguese, I made notes in Portuguese as well. It is a translation made by me, not an official translation.
As a result, I gave this book a rating of 7.5/10.
For me, a book with a note 10 is one I consider reading again every year. Among the books I rank with 10, for example, is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Overview of Agile
Agile is a way of approaching work that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iteration.
It’s often used in software development, but can be applied to any type of project or team.
The main idea behind agile is to break down large, complex tasks into smaller chunks and work on them in short sprints.
This allows teams to respond quickly to changes and deliver value to customers in a timely manner.
Agile also places a strong emphasis on clear communication and teamwork, with all team members working together to achieve a common goal.
Agile means being able to move, think and understand quickly. It is a concept that encompasses a variety of techniques that enable companies to adapt quickly to new challenges.
The agile methodology focuses on delivering the most valuable features first, then communicating with customers in real-time to enable direct feedback.
My Book Highlights & Quotes
“… Scrum is one of the most popular agile methods today and has a greater focus on the managerial aspects of software development. In it, each iteration is called a sprint. Generally, each sprint has a month period that can vary from a few days to a few weeks. The people involved in the development process are divided in Scrum into three main roles: the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the team…”
“… Unlike most agile methods, Kanban does not require iterations. Instead, it decouples planning, prioritization, development, and delivery so that each activity has its own cadence based on the reality and needs of the process. At regular intervals, repetitions succeed each other in a cadence. The Kanban method sets the pace for a certain type of event. It is possible to have a different cadence for prioritization, deliverables, retrospectives, and any recurring events…”
“… Each time a new team is formed, a process of maturation takes place. Newly formed teams are not as productive and dynamic as those whose members have already gotten to know each other, their strengths and challenges…”
“… In “Your Path to Agile Fluency,” Diana Larsey and James Shore claim that “turnover is the main cause of lost fluency in an agile team, and that when a team gains or loses members, it faces difficulties sustaining what it already knows…”
“… The Broken Window Theory states that a broken window, if not fixed for a while, gives people a sense that no one cares about the building. Before long, the building is so damaged that the owner is no longer able to repair it, so what was once just a sense of abandonment becomes a reality. When a developer leaves a code without testing coverage, for example, the next developer feels that the code wasn’t cared for, and creates a new method that’s untested…”
“… The results of metrics on individual work are corrupted when people believe they will be affected by them. In addition, measuring individual performance can undermine teamwork, since helping another team member may improve the teamwork performance metric while hurting yours. As collaboration tends to improve the performance of the team as a whole, the collaboration between people will be more encouraged when the team is measured rather than the individual…”
The book illustrates agile methodologies and guides, through questions about what to do and what is being done, how to achieve a good level of management with agile methods, always emphasizing people and how some tools can influence the outcome.
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