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Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for Extreme Programming and the Unified Process
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Author: Scott W. Ambler, Ron Jeffries
List Price: $34.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0471202827
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (22 March, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 21,350
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
If you live in a world of too much documentation, read this
For those few places left that steep themselves in documentation and don't have a legally-required reason to do so (do they exist?), this book should help motivate why producing too much documentation and doing too much modeling up front can hurt rather than help. Even for a company that sees itself as lightweight, he's got some rough assessments you can do to see if you're overdoing things, which were relevant even where I work.The only bad thing is that it was a very theory and ideal oriented book. It didn't contain concrete examples of what Agile Modeling would look like on a real project, how it would feel, and how what models were produced would evolve. This made it a bit difficult to verify my interpretation of the book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
We love it, managers hate it
I work at a consulting firm where the management lies and rips off the customer all the time. The day someone brought in this book and start talking about agile modeling, the managers were scared. A meeting was called and this book was banned. The reason is simple: If everyone practice what this book is advocating, the business of charging the customers like hell by purchasing expensive modeling software, creating tons of documentations without doing any real work, and always prolonging the project will end sooner than the owners getting their BMWs and McMasions.
The simple fact that this little book caused headaces to the criminal minded management team tells me how great it is! I wish I can give it ten starts!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Violating its own principles
One of the values of the agile movement is simplicity, which the author kindly spends about two pages explaining it to us mere mortals. And it seems only logical that this high principle would also imply brevity. Unfortunately, this book in itself is a violation of that principle. The only useful lesson that one can possibly distill from this three hundred and fifty pages tome is the following: Keep it simple, lose it if you don't use it, and don't hesitate to ditch your expensive modeling software when it becomes too restrictive. A wonderful and very effective advice if I may add, but there is definitely no need for an entire book to explain it.This book is neither a modeling tutorial nor an introduction. And if you have had any decent amount of practical modeling experience then chances are you have already learned the above lesson. As such, the book fails to hit the mark for both experts and novice modelers. Nevertheless, the lesson it contains is important, thus the two stars. The book itself, however, receives a flat zero rating.
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