News
Managing Iterative Development book published
Date: 10 August 2006
Ian Spence' new book has been released and can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/032126889X/sr=1-1/qid=1156248751/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-3838391-4303330?ie=UTF8&s=books
Here is a review from the amazon website.
Wow!!! They did it again!!!, August 7, 2006
| Reviewer: | Jose Papo (São Paulo, Brasil) -  |
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First it's important for me to say I already became a fan of the authors when I read their excellent book "Use Case Modeling". As I said in my review(still valid to this date): "If you can buy only one book about use cases, then buy this one !!!!". They created a masterpiece about RUP Requirements discipline.
Well... now, with the release of "Managing Iterative Software Development Projects", they did another SW Engineering best-of-breed book about Project Management(with RUP and also other agile approaches!).
With agile and iterative approaches becoming the mainstream in SW processes (just see how IBM, Borland, Microsoft, Compuware and other SW products companies jumped the agile bandwagon), this book is a must read for SW Project managers and leaders.
The book is divided in three parts:
- Part I: The Principles of Iterative Project Management -> this is for the project managers which still don't know the values and principles of iterative development and why they work better than waterfall approaches. As I already read a lot of books about iterative development( one of the most important books to understand the benefits of agile development is "Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman), I read this part very fast :-).
- Part II: The meat of the book -> Here we can break these in two sections: In chapters 6, 7, 8 the authors explain how to create a Layered Approach to Planning and Managing Iterative Projects. They explain, respectively, how to create: The overall project planning, the evolution and phase planning, the iteration planning. The second section(chapters 9, 10 and 11) deals with important considerations about assessments and retrospectives, how to scale for small or large projects, how to get started with Iterative Project Management.
Part III: Appendices -> Here we have an introduction to Use-Case Driven Development and some Outlines, Templates, and Checklists for the artifacts discussed in the book. But the best section is Appendix C, which contains a very nice example of an ATM project(based on their previous book, which also is good to give a sense of continuity) with: Overall Project Plan for Version 1.0 , Evolution 1 Plan, Evolution 1 Iteration Elaboration1 Plan and iteration E1 assessment.