Julio Santos

Interesting book this one is.

I’m not sure if I should recommend it, though at the same time it has lots of good information. I know this is unfair, because after reading dozens of books on the subject, the tendency is to learn less and less with each book, and maybe that’s why I’m not thrilled.

The book doesn’t introduce any new ideas. Instead, it captures what has been said elsewhere, and packages it in a single book. That makes it quite interesting actually.

After going over the motivation for Iterative Development it has a whole chapter on evidence for why you should choose Iterative over Waterfall/Predictive/Sequential processes (yes, in 2006 it’s still necessary to “sell” Iterative).

This chapter had huge potential for being boring (I didn’t need to see evidence once again) but it turned out quite interesting. I knew that Incremental and Iterative Development (IID) had been around for a while, but I didn’t know you could trace it all the way back to the 1930’s. Then a few mega-projects were built in the 70’s using IID because, and I’m paraphrasing:

“these projects are so complex, waterfall won’t work here…sorry”

What’s funny is that IBM was behind some of this IID movement. Practicing, showing evidence, and just leading the industry towards a waterfall-less world. What happened?

The next chapters are a summary of some of the existing IID processes: Scrum, XP, RUP and Evo. One chapter for each. If you already know these processes, you can just skip it, you won’t learn anything new. If you didn’t know about these processes, these are some decent summaries.

Finally the author closes with some practical advice for project managers on how to implement these strategies.

–

I started by saying that I wasn’t sure if this book was absolutely necessary, given that I haven’t learned that much. Then I remembered that today alone I had to argue this:

It is a misunderstanding to let the iteration length expand when it appears the goals can’t be met within the original timeframe. Rather, the usual expert strategy is to remove or simplify goals for the iteration.

I argued this not on one occasion, not on two occasions, but on three different occasions! This alone makes me want to recommend this book to project managers new to Iterative Development or anyone who wants to understand what IID is, how to implement it, why it works, and what not to do.

Yes, I can change my mind based on nothing…oh well.