software design

Kent Beck and Martin Fowler have to be something of a "dream team" for a computer book. Not only was this book informative and interesting, but I actually enjoyed reading it. The book crackles with ideas and sparkles with a subtle wit.

The content of the book covers all aspects of planning, managing and tracking progress on an XP (Extreme Programming) project and is a worthy companion to Kent Beck's anthemic XP Explained. Hard stuff missed out from the earlier work such as how to estimate how long things will take, how to write user stories and how to organize the details of iterations and releases is explained in a straightforward way. It also introduces a few new key XP concepts, showing that this radical methodology didn't spring fully formed into the mind of Beck, but is still evolving. One such key is "Yesterdays Weather", the idea that you can't go far wrong by using past performance as an initial guess for future results.

If you are at all intrigued by the new "agile" methodologies, read XP Explained and then this one. Then buy a few more copies for your management.

Kent Beck and Martin Fowler wrote an excellent book about the planing process for Extreme Programming (XP). Although it helps to have read Kent Beck's 'Extreme Programming Explained', I found the book useful even without knowing too much about XP beforehand.

The book is easy to read (more like a story then a scientific book) and well structured. Beck and Fowler also let the reader focused on the importent issues and did not try to discuss every possible sub-case (which they could have done very easily to blow up the size of the book).

Knowing Addision-Wesley quality books, I was a little disappointed about the way the book was put together. E.g. 'Velocity' is defined (using bold letters) on page 43, but that page is not mentioned in the index.

This book lays out the point of planning, the approach taken, and the steps to do.

This book has a lot of content not found in any other XP book that I own. The gold nuggets in here are useful for project management for years to come. It's a 5 star for sure.