
Ask YC: Good agile book? - andr
I'm outside of Amazon coverage right now, but I'm going in there soon. What is the one book on agile development I should get? Also, how good is agile for teams of 2 or individuals?
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DanielBMarkham
I'll let the other folks point you to the books. There are a lot.

Agile rocks for small teams. Set up a work queue (backlog) and an iteration
size (how often you want to build/release). Then just start pulling things off
the queue and putting them into your releases.

If you get caught up in the details, you've missed the point. Agile is about
flexibility and adaptation -- a team of two guys should be _very_ flexible.

E-mail me if you run into any snags.

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green
There are a lot of them. A lot!

But it depends if you are interested in pure methodology, or you want to see
some example of applying it in software/Web development with PHP/Java/RoR/...

From my experience, I found helpful next books:

"Test Driven Development: By Example" by Kent Beck

"Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices" by Robert C.
Martin

"Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman

"Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber

"Agile Software Development Ecosystems" by Jim Highsmith

Those are pretty "technology independent". Helpful to understand the idea. And
the authors are respected and well known in the community of agile developers.

If you work with RoR (which is popular choice nowadays) you may find "Agile
Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Hansson interesting, but
it does not cover "agile methodology" itself too wide. But it does give a good
overview of practical usage. Anyhow, personally I still prefer to learn theory
before practice, but many people see it working for them ;-)

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pmarsh
"The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore & Shane Warden

As for individuals it works, but you'll have to pick out the parts that you
really could make use of and leave other parts to the wayside.

I'd say it helps organize your project but it all comes down to you being
disciplined. For that Agile isn't going to help much.

