1.1 Why This Book?

Lets start of with a basic question "Why should you read this book?" The answer, as I hope you will see, is because it brings together a range of the most popular Agile Methods and presents them back to back allowing you, the reader, to gain an insight into what it means to be agile, what agile methods are (and are not), what Agile Modelling is and what XP (Extreme Programming) is. However, it goes further than this and considers how some of the approaches can be used together, how you can plan larger agile project (using a feature-driven approach) and how you can introduce agile methods into your organisation. All of this is done in a practical, no-nonsense manner that cuts through the hype and tells it to you straight!

That is, you should read this book because it tells you how to actually plan, organise and approach software systems in an Agile Manner. It does not try to sell you an evangelical, purist or (pardon the pun) extreme view. Instead it introduces the coreconcepts and methods in a concise and easy digested form. It also evaluates how successful the core techniques, such as Extreme Programming (often referred to as XP) and Agile Modelling can be, as well as what problems may be encountered. It then shows how some of these problems have been overcome on real-world projects by combining XP, Agile Modelling and Feature-Driven Development.

Without a book like this you can be...