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FOREWORD
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Initiating and sustaining an effective agile development program is a challenging
journey. First, implementation should involve far more than the development team. A
broad array of cross-functional impacts should be considered, not to mention the fact
that agile might well require a different management approach. Second, the technical
practices that agile brings to the table—short iterations, test-first development, contin-
uous integration—are not optional. Ignore them or leave them until later at your own
risk. Finally, nothing, not even agile development, will remove the inherent complex-
ity of software development or its nonlinear escalation with size.
In Becoming Agile, Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky lay out a path to agile software
development that addresses the typical failure modes. First, they understand that no
environment is perfect, and it is practically impossible to roll out a perfect agile pro-
cess. To compensate for this reality, Greg and Ahmed suggest numerous ways of pursu-
ing the agile principles within the constraints of your business. The book does not ask
you to discard processes that have been successful for you; the authors realize your
existing processes may have many positive aspects. They show you how to convene a
cross-functional steering committee to guide the agile implementation so that it fits
into your organization.
Second, since part of being agile is learning and adapting, Greg and Ahmed show
you how to pilot the new approach. They explain how to select a pilot project and how
to try out the new ideas and adapt them so they work in your context. Through an
extended case study, they show what actually happened in agile deployments they
have led. The case study also introduces real personas so you can see how different
personality types react to a move to agile.
Finally, Greg and Ahmed dispel the notion that agile is a simple recipe that anyone
can learn in a day with guaranteed success. Instead of offering a simple, foolproof for-
mula, this book shows how to thoughtfully introduce agile into a company. After lead-
ing you through a readiness assessment to determine the most logical areas to
introduce agile, Greg and Ahmed take you through assembling a cross-functional lead-
ership team, identifying the best aspects of your current process, designing more adap-
tive processes, carefully choosing a pilot, trying and adapting the process, and gradually
improving and expanding agile processes over time. This strikes me as a more likely
approach to successfully evolve a new development process that fits the company.
The book is full of simple tools that will help people think clearly; it is about readi-
ness, chartering, specifying, estimating, assuring quality, product demonstrations, ret-
rospectives, and so on. By using an extended case study, Greg and Ahmed show you one
example of a migration to agile, all the while pointing out other ways to accomplish the
same objectives. Their book is neither a recipe nor a set of principles. It is a thoughtful,
practical set of steps, presented with commentary and alternatives, about how to become
agile. It will help you put together an agile development approach that matches your
company needs and has a high likelihood of delivering sustained value over time.
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