Feb 8, 2012 3
Review: The Agile Samurai (Jonathan Rasmusson)
The Agile Samurai, Jonathan Rasmusson
Many are the books full of semi-useless sage device on how to manage software development. Few are those that, within a few chapters, empower you to call shenanigans on a buzzword-clad impostor. For the latter service, I’m most recently indebted to Rasmusson’s The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software.
Agile, unfortunately, is a concept that’s been much abused by the aforesaid buzzword charlatans. It’s an idea that’s easy to pitch in an elevator but hard to do for real. And worse, it’s hip. No one wants to be a stuck-in-the-mud naysayer in tech circles (well, no one except for cranky old mainframe programmers — and they’re allowed).
The result is a lot of misinformation and misconception about what Agile really is, what type of projects it fits, and what kind of team you need to do it right. There’s also a basic failure out there to understand that you don’t use everything in Agile. It’s a toolkit, and some of its processes are best skipped in certain situations.
Rasmusson’s book applies the swift katana of justice to all this nonsense. Within a few chapters, I not only had a good grasp of what Agile is, but what it isn’t. He then spends the rest of the book on details of process and, most importantly, offering quick sketches of scenarios in which a given technique succeeded or failed.
As a business analyst, this book challenged everything I’d previously thought about how and when to document the results of my interviews with stakeholders. As a project manager, I walked away with a bunch of useful new tools (kanban boards & Agile-style burndown charts for the win!). As a sometime-coder, I learned some new concepts about good coding practice, which in turn has made me smarter about asking questions of the devs with whom I work.
I was a little suspicious when I picked up the book of the occasional cartoons, the large space given to some infographics, and the quirky sensei/student warrior dialogs that close each chapter. But at the end of the day, I’m a nerd; I love the semi-hokey samurai flavoring. Rather than making the book light on substance, they lighten it as a read, making it a quick book to get through over a series of lunch hours.
And so I will end with a hearty recommendation, and a quote from another samurai book, Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho (Book of Five Rings):
Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things. As if it were a straight road mapped out on the ground … These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the Way of strategy there will not be one thing you cannot see.