The Agile Samurai

2011-07-23

The Agile Samurai
The Agile Samurai

by Jonathan Rasmusson

1st edition, 280 pages

Pragmatic Bookshelf
Book Review

Over the last ten years, I've been working with teams with different degrees of commitment to the agile process, ranging from non-existing to quite strong. I was looking for a text that summarises agile methodology to help me formalise and articulate my own experiences, and of course to enhance my knowledge of some of the finer points of agile practices. I have to admit that this book did not meet my expectations. The first eighty pages up to chapter six are mostly about project inception and read like a prolonged introduction. From chapter six onwards, the author finally comes to the point and discusses the core concepts of agile processes, so the book does get better with increasing page numbers. Unfortunately, Scrum isn’t discussed at all, instead Kanban is introduced in chapter eight. The discussion of typical technical processes, such as refactoring, TDD, and continuous integration is compacted into several brief chapters at the end of the book.

The writing style is very informal; the author uses a conversational tone throughout the book. Almost every page contains illustrations, which makes it an easy and quick read. The style of the book is comparable to the Head First books. It left me with the the impression that I sat in an all-day meeting where someone said a lot of intelligent things to which everyone else agreed. Unfortunately, not many of these things seemed radically new or thought-provoking, so I fear I won’t remember many of them next month. Of course, this may be entirely my own fault. I prefer a more formal, concise, old-school language. I also prefer dense and meaty text books with lots of diagrams, numbers and formulas. In return, I can dispense with stick figures, pictograms, and even with Master Sensei (a guru character used in the book). I feel that a lot of the deeper and more complex issues of agile project management have simply been left out.

To be fair, it must be mentioned that I probably do not fall into the target group for which this book was written. It is more appropriate as an introductory text for people who are new to agile project management, or even new to the entire business of project management. Think “trial lesson” and “beginner course”.