Learning Agile ─ Understanding Scrum, Xp, Lean, and Kanban

Agile revolutionized the way people think about developing software, but there are literally dozens of ways that you can "go agile." While one team may find a particular agile practice easy to use, another team may find the same practice devilishly difficult. This book demystifies agile methodologies: why they’re designed the way they are, what problems they address, and the values, principles, and ideas they embody.

Learning Agile helps you recognize the principles that apply to development problems specific to your team, company, and projects. You’ll discover how to use that information to guide your choice of methodologies and practices.

With this book you’ll learn:

• Values that effective software teams possess
• The methodologies that embody those values
• The practices that make up those methodologies
• And principles that help you bring those values, methodologies, and practices to your team and your company

Andrew Stellman, despite being raised a New Yorker, has lived in Pittsburgh twice. The first time was when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, and then again when he and Jenny were starting their consulting business and writing their first project management book for O'Reilly. When he moved back to his hometown, his first job after college was as a programmer at EMI-Capitol Records--which actually made sense, since he went to LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts to study cello and jazz bass guitar. He and Jenny first worked together at that same financial software company, where he was managing a team of programmers. He's since managed various teams of software engineers, requirements analysts, and led process improvement efforts. Andrew keeps himself busy eating an enormous amount of string cheese and Middle Eastern desserts, playing music (but video games even more), studying taiji and aikido, having a girlfriend named Lisa, and owing a pomeranian. For more information about Andrew, Jennifer Greene, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

Jennifer Greene, has spent the past 15 years or so building software for many different kinds of companies. She's worked for small start-ups and some huge companies along the way. She's built software test teams and helped lots of companies diagnose and deal with habitual process problems so that they could build better software. Since her start in software test and process definition, she's branched out into development management and project management. She's currently managing a big development team for a global media company and she's managed just about every aspect of software development through her career.

Jennifer founded Stellman & Greene Consulting with Andrew Stellman in 2003, initially to serve the scientific and academic community. They have worked in a wide range of industries including finance, telecommunications, media, non-profit, entertainment, natural language processing, science and academia. They do speaking engagements, provide training on development practices, manage teams, and build software. Together, they've written two highly acclaimed books on project management (Head First PMP and Applied Software Project Management), Head First C#, and most recently just finished up Beautiful Teams.

For more information about Jennifer, Andrew Stellman, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.