by Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac
Agility and Discipline Made Easy is all about how to mindfully tailor and adapt RUP/OpenUP to achieve Agility within the real-world constraints of many large organizations and more formal process cultures. In short: I really liked the book and I really disliked the title. For so many of us living in large or corporate environments trying to figure out how to successfully adapt and scale "Agile" for our organizations, this book is exactly what the doctor ordered!
I like the book immensely because it is one of the few books to comprehensively address the subject of how to introduce and apply agile practices in a context-sensitive matter, particularly for larger and more traditional/plan-based organizations. I am a big fan of taking a patterns-based approach to evaluating the context, forces, and rationale of a problem-solution pair when considering how and if to apply and adapt it to my own context for my particular project and organization. This book does just that! It shows how to go about instantiating, configuring, and tailoring the applicable RUP practices to reach a sustainable balance of agility in a new or existing software development endeavor.
The book begins by describing what practices are and the pattern-like format that it subsequently uses to describe the practices of OpenUP/RUP: problem, background, application, comparison with other practices, adoption, related best practices, and additional information.
Advertisement
It then delves into a discussion of levels of adoption and the "Waterfall vs. Iterative" spectrum along with the "Low ceremony vs. High ceremony" spectrum (relating each as intersecting axes corresponding to various degrees of risk/uncertainty and required documentation and traceability).
Then we are presented with a description of six fundamental "business-driven software development principles" that "characterize the software industry's best practices in the creation, deployment, and evolution of software intensive systems." These are:
Adapt the process
Balance stakeholder priorities
Collaborate across teams
Demonstrate value iteratively
Elevate the level of abstraction
Focus continuously on quality.
Afterward we get a brief overview of the UP lifecycle and of OpenUP, RUP, Extreme Programming (XP), and Scrum. Each of the next seven chapters is devoted to one of the above seven principles, and systematically describes the software practices most closely related to that principle (there are 20 practices in all).
The majority of the insight in the book is in the first chapter ("Leveraging Key Development Principles"), the sections of each practice describing its application, adoption and related practices, and the last two chapters ("Adapt the Process" and "Making Practical Use of the Best Practices"). These sections are where "theory meets practice" and guidelines and frameworks are laid out for how to appropriately custom-craft the practices for your context.
OpenUP was recently released under OpenSource terms as part of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), and the book devotes an appendix each to the EPF and IBM Rational Method Composer.
I mentioned earlier that I really disliked the title of the book. This is because I feel the title inaccurately intimates that "Agile" isn't very disciplined (in fact, it is very much so) and that balancing agility and traditional plan-based methods can be "easy" (even if you follow the book's approach, it's certainly not "easy," but the book's well-organized approach does provide a systematic framework to guide you through it).
That said, however, many of us "live and breathe" in large enterprises and struggle to introduce any degree of agility into our workplace. Resistance is often high and many run away screaming (or charge forward guns a' blazing) at the mere mention of terms such as agile, extreme, or pairing. For those, Agility and Discipline Made Easy does more than just provide a systematic framework for evaluating and applying agility, one practice at-a-time. It lets us use language that is much more comfortable and familiar to those who would otherwise hastily turn a deaf ear to our attempts at injecting some agility into our workforce.
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' 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.
Articles 
by Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac
