If you're looking for a light introduction and overview of agile software development this is probably a good book for you. I think I'll have got some value from the earlier chapters but on the whole I felt it took a long time to describe things in too many different ways that often didn't really warrant the effort. For example, the "Master Sensei and the Aspiring Warrior" interludes didn't add much value and I started skipping them about 2/3 of the way through. I also ended up skimming through the unit testing, test driven development and continuous integration chapters as they were too generic and simplistic to be useful. I enjoyed this book and found that it had useful information. I am not Scrum certified and haven't picked up an XP book in years and enjoyed reading about the current state of the Agile world. The book feels authentic because the author lets you know throughout the book that the goal is to write great software that is useful to your customers and there is no one way to do that -- you have to be open to ideas and give them a whirl on your project. I'll have to revisit the chapter on estimation because that is the part of the job I typically struggle with. The notion of an Inception Deck is one I had not heard of before and found it very compelling. I'll have to try it myself to see if it works for us but it looks like it could be very useful and a tad bit scary -- you have to ask some tough questions when creating the deck. In short, I think the Pragmatic Programmer guys have produced another DRM-free, interesting and useful book. Two thumbs up.
It was the second time that I read the book. Very useful lessons that I will integrate in my work.
—crisy
Fast way to learn how things work in agile methodology / extreme programming
—Jeremiah
Great overview of agile. Rasmusson knows what he is talking about.
—ruthw
Great for Agile beginners working on a customer facing product.
—rhiannon
Excellent pragmatic primer
—idania
