There's some repetition, as he repeats the analysis for various processes. This makes sections a little dry on a straight read-through, but I suspect this will be a strength if you go in for reference with respect to a single process.

Overall, the topic is somewhat specialized, and this is not something developers would typically read. (It does say "Management".) But I find it cheering as a part of a trend of books on agile software management, that tie into the experience in the lean manufacturing world. (Reviewed May, '04)

Sanjiv answers the question, "What do managers do on an agile team?" to say that they have many functions: team building, alignment, adaptation, and more. I particularly appreciated the chapter on using a "light touch." Throughout, the author suggests a number of activities that a team can try to build up its capabilities. (Reviewed Sept., '05) [Disclaimer: I was an advance reviewer, and have had a modest business relationship with the author.]

Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. Addison-Wesley, 2004.
Overall, this is a balanced treatment "agile" and "plan-driven" methods. (My biggest complaint is the title; if it had been "Balancing Agility and Planning" I think it would have been fairer. As Alistair
Cockburn points out in one of the forewords, you can have low- or high-discipline agile methods.) The authors present the characteristics of both approaches, and then create a risk-based "scorecard" that tries to balance the risks and benefits of each. Their conclusion is that the different methods have different home grounds, and new methods need to balance both. Especially if you've been looking at only classical methods or only agile methods, this book is recommended. (Reviewed Sept., '05)

Crystal Clear is a software method that uses frequent delivery, reflective improvement, and osmotic communication as guard rails to guide a team in development. This book presents a number of perspectives on the methods; my favorite is the catalog of acceptable work products. (Reviewed Jan., '05)

An excellent overview of agile development. "Software as a cooperative game of invention and communication." Individuals and teams. Charts as "information radiators." Describing methodology (it's harder than it looks).  Methodological success: it delivered, the leadership stayed intact, and people would work the same way again. Agility as self-adaptation. "Barely sufficient" methods. The importance of reflection.

Description of the Crystal family: Crystal Clear (incremental delivery, without quite as much required discipline as XP), Crystal Orange (for teams of up to 40 people), and Crystal Orange Web (modified to support a particular web team). Analysis of the agile manifesto.

Finally, includes selections from "Programming as Theory Building" (Naur), "On Participation and Skill" (Ehn), and "The Book of Five Rings" (Musashi). (Reviewed Nov., '02)

A thought experiment in novel form: what would happen if we could run the same project multiple ways in a project management laboratory? The main character keeps a journal of all the project management ideas he gets, including things like thinking of a jelled team as a project deliverable, what an analysis or design needs to include, consequences of pathological management, and the benefits of small teams (at least at the beginning). (Reviewed Feb., '03)

An MMF - "minimal marketable feature" - represents a unit of functionality that has value. This book shows how incremental delivery and incremental funding of MMFs can work together to improve the value created from software projects. (Reviewed May, '05)

Evans has developed a pattern language that focuses on how thinking about our domain needs to be of primary importance in developing software. This understanding should show up consistently in how customers and programmers talk about the domain, as well as in the code. His language includes discussion of key architectural concerns such as an effective persistence mechanism and layering.

People have struggled with "what's a metaphor" in XP. His pattern language provides the concrete notions of "ubiquitous language" and domain modeling to make that area more concrete. He has a wonderful example of how a shift to talking about "share pie" and "share arithmetic" solved a lot of persistent rounding problems in financial software. (I would call this a metaphor; I'm not sure he would.)

Like Design Patterns, this is a book that deserves to be studied and expanded on. This will still be a significant book years from now

(Reviewed December, 2003.)

Requirements by Collaboration, Ellen Gottesdiener. ISBN 0-201-78606-0. Addison-Wesley, 2002.
Workshops are an effective place to capture requirements - getting the right people in the room, working together well, they can reach important agreements about what is needed. This book focuses mostly on workshops: how to organize and run them. While there's a little bit about particular documents or approaches for requirements, this book is focused less on those techniques and more on the workshop itself. (Reviewed Sept., '05)

Descriptions of several agile methods, and Interviews with their creators. (Reviewed Nov., '02)

Scrum explicitly relies on the emergence of a true team. By focusing on 30-day sprints, daily standup meetings, and management's ability to remove obstacles, a team has an environment in which to flourish. There's also the idea of a "Scrum of scrums," which I think has the best potential for large-scale agile teams. (Reviewed Nov., '02)

Starts with "What is quality?" Looks at management patterns for software development, and highlights the importance of feedback. Uses system models (that show interconnections with reinforcing and damping feedback) to examine the impact of management and the need to steer. Considers the challenges of steering, and of customer feedback.

Weinberg applies these tools to look at quality and errors. Errors are hard to find, and resolving one problem can create others. Finally, he looks at how stress and pressure can cause breakdowns in teams. (Reviewed Nov., '02)

First-order measurement is the use of back-of-the-envelope calculations sufficient for building something. Weinberg relates Satir's interaction model (intake, meaning, significance, and response) to software management.

The author suggests some good metrics, and there are some effective graphs to go with them, but the key value of this book is more in learning to think about projects and people. I particularly liked the chapters on "precision listening" and "observations from the empathic position." (Reviewed Jan., '03)

Considers software management from the perspective of family therapist Virginia Satir. People can take different incongruent stances: placating, blaming, super-reasonable, or irrelevant. But a congruent stance is more effective, balancing self, other, and context, to provide helpful feedback.

Weinberg also looks at a number of challenges around team formation. It's important to give teams the right level of challenge and support, and to intervene effectively when they need it. (Reviewed Nov., '02)

(Reviewed July, '03)