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 Allan Kelly's book Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile is not what you might expect at first. It's not about the practices and techniques to use in order to adopt and adapt Agile development, nor about how to execute and master various Agile practices. This book is about how Agile development and its adoption is really the application of knowledge management, learning organizations, and organizational change management. Those seeking a deeper understanding of this connection and what it means when trying to adopt agility won't be disappointed.This ~230 page book is divided into 12 chapters. Chapter 1 is simply a brief introduction to the purpose and premise of the book, which includes defining software development as knowledge work. I liked this because I'm a big fan of Philip Armour's work in this area in The Laws of Software Process, where Armour argues early in the book that software is not a product but rather a medium for storing executable knowledge (and therefore software development is a knowledge creation activity). I also like the early reference to Peter Drucker's work in this area.  The second chapter is about "Understanding Agile", particularly the values and principles of Agile and Lean and their underlying roots. Chapters 3-5 are about "Knowledge creation & management", "Learning", and "Learning organizations" and introduce us to the basic vocabulary, theory and models of those domains. Chapter 6 takes a step away from the previous three to discuss IT and the present nature of IT work and IT itself as an agent of change. Then Kelly discusses organizational change management in depth in the next three chapters (7-9). My favorite chapter is the one on change models (chapter 8) where we get to learn about each of the following theories: Lewin, Satir, Kotter, Theory E, Theory 0, and Appreciative Inquiry. The last three chapters (10-12) focus on leading and empowering individuals (through change), planning change, and final advice and recap of the books three key interlocking ideas:
About the Reviewer Brad Appleton is an enterprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100 technology company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply agile development & SCM practices. Brad also author's the Agile CM Environments blog, and is co-author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the "Agile SCM" column in CMCrossroads.com's CM Journal, and is a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987, Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 14:04 |
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