Preface
Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
A: Practice, man, practice!
We want to help you master the art of agile development.
Agile development, like any approach to team-based software development, is a fundamentally human art, one subject to the vagaries of individuals and their interactions. To master agile development, you must learn to evaluate myriad possibilities, moment to moment, and intuitively pick the best course of action.
How can you possibly learn such a difficult skill? Practice!
First and foremost, this book is a detailed description of one way to practice agile development: Extreme Programming (XP). It’s a practical guide that, if followed mindfully, will allow you to successfully bring agile development in the form of XP to your team—or will help you decide that it’s not a good choice in your situation.
Our second purpose is to help you master the art of agile development. Mastering agility means going beyond our cookbook of practices. Agile development is too context-sensitive for one approach to be entirely appropriate, and too nuanced for any book to teach you how to master it. Mastery comes from within: from experience and from an intuitive understanding of ripples caused by the pebble of a choice.
We can’t teach you how your choices will ripple throughout your organization. We don’t try. You must provide the nuance and understanding. This is the only way to master the art. Follow the practices. Watch what happens. Think about why they worked... or didn’t work. ...
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