welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for The Agile Idea. Everyone on a project team, and with an interest in the success of software development projects, will benefit from this book.

My experience in managing software development projects spans from the beginning of the use of pre-Agile project management tools, up to today, when Agile, often in the form of Scrum, is the standard for managing software development. I saw the pre-Agile approaches fail too often. I saw that they were cumbersome and inflexible. I saw Agile emerge and become dominant. I have seen good, thoughtful, informed Agile practice, and I have seen teams and projects that miss the point of Agile.

There is a new urgency in understanding project management for software development. Nearly every business is now a software business, whether they know it or not. Every business needs to know how to manage the creation of software. Every person in a business, from the coders to the CEO needs to know how and why software development is different, and why it requires a special kind of project management.

This book strips Agile down to the fundamentals. It identifies the reasons Agile works better. It enables project managers and tech leaders to explain Agile, and their Agile software projects, to senior management and other interested parties. With a deep understanding of Agile you will know what practices are good for software development, and what makes success hard to attain.