Kurzbeschreibung
Synopsis
Buchrückseite
"The best thinking in the agile development community brought to street-level in the form of implementable strategy and tactics. Essential reading for anyone who shares the passion for creating quality software."
—Eric Olafson, CEO Tomax
"Crystal Clear is beyond agile. This book leads you from software process hell to successful software development by practical examples and useful samples."
—Basaki Satoshi, Schlumberger
"A very powerful message, delivered in a variety of ways to touch the motivation and understanding of many points of view."
—Laurie Williams, Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University
"A broad, rich understanding of small-team software development based on observations of what actually works."
—John Rusk
"A superb synthesis of underlying principles and a clear description of strategies and techniques."
—Géry Derbier, Project Manager, Solistic
"Alistair Cockburn shows how small teams can be highly effective at developing fit-for-purpose software by following a few basic software development practices and by creating proper team dynamics. These small teams can be much more effective and predictable than much larger teams that follow overly bureaucratic and prescriptive development processes."
—Todd Little, Sr. Development Manager, Landmark Graphics
"I find Cockburn's writings on agile methods enlightening: He describes 'how to do,' of course, but also how to tell whether you're doing it right, to reach into the feeling of the project. This particular book's value is that actual project experiences leading to and confirming the principles and practices are so...well...clearly presented."
—Scott Duncan, ASQ Software Division Standards Chair and representative to the US SC7 TAG and IEEE S2ESC Executive Committee and Management Board and Chair of IEEE Working Group 1648 on agile methods
"Crystal Clear identifies principles that work not only for software development, but also for any results-centric activities. Dr. Cockburn follows these principles with concrete, practical examples of how to apply the principles to real situations and roles and to resolve real issues."
—Niel Nickolaisen, COO, Deseret Book
"All the successful projects I've been involved with or have observed over the past 19 or so years have had many of the same characteristics as described in Crystal Clear (even the big projects). And many of the failed projects failed because they missed something—such as expert end-user involvement or accessibility throughout the project. The final story was a great read. Here was a project that in my opinion was an overwhelming success—high productivity, high quality, delivery, happy customer, and the fact that the team would do it again. The differing styles in each chapter kept it interesting. I started reading it and couldn't put it down, and by the end, I just had to say 'Wow!'"
—Ron Holliday, Director, Fidelity Management Research
Carefully researched over ten years and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams is a lucid and practical introduction to running a successful agile project in your organization. Each chapter illuminates a different important aspect of orchestrating agile projects.
Highlights include
- Attention to the essential human and communication aspects of successful projects
- Case studies, examples, principles, strategies, techniques, and guiding properties
- Samples of work products from real-world projects instead of blank templates and toy problems
- Top strategies used by software teams that excel in delivering quality code in a timely fashion
- Detailed introduction to emerging best-practice techniques, such as Blitz Planning, Project 360º, and the essential Reflection Workshop
- Question-and-answer with the author about how he arrived at these recommendations, including where they fit with CMMI, ISO, RUP, XP, and other methodologies
- A detailed case study, including an ISO auditor's analysis of the project
Perhaps the most important contribution this book offers is the Seven Properties of Successful Projects. The author has studied successful agile projects and identified common traits they share. These properties lead your project to success; conversely, their absence endangers your project.
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Über den Autor
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Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams
Preface
Crystal Clear: A few key rules to get a small project into its safety zone.
You have barely enough resources to get the system out. You don't want the team to write long documents, but they are forgetting things they are supposed to know about. You dislike heavy software development processes, but you want your team to work better than just randomly. You particularly want the software to come out the door successfully.
You considered sitting down and writing out the basic discussions the team should have and the work products they must be careful to attend to. You asked yourself:
What have other small, successful project teams done?
What practices do they use?
This book answers those questions. It is the result of ten years of debriefing successful small teams. Most of them repeated the same message:
Seat people close together, communicating frequently and with goodwill.
Get most of the bureaucracy out of their way and let them design.
Get a real user directly involved.
Have a good automated regression test suite available.
Produce shippable functionality early and often.
Do all that, and most of the process details will take care of themselves.
This book sets out one of the most efficient and habitable methodologies you might hope to find: Crystal Clear. It is a human-powered methodology, most simply described as follows:
The lead designer and two to seven other developers in a large room or adjacent rooms, with information radiators such as whiteboards and flip charts on the wall, having access to key users, distractions kept away, delivering running, tested, usable code every month or two (okay, three at the most), periodically reflecting and adjusting on their working style.
This simple recommendation rests on both experience and theory. Software development can be characterized as an economically constrained cooperative game of invention and communication.1 The way the team plays each game has everything to do with the project's outcome and the resulting software. Crystal Clear tackles the economic-cooperative game directly, addressing where to pay attention, where to simplify, and how to vary the rules. A number of teams have shared with me—and now with you, through this book—examples of their rules, work products, and even office layouts.
Many so-called "best" methodologies get rejected by a team as being too constraining, too invasive, or too difficult. Crystal Clear does not aspire to be a "best" methodology; it aspires to be "sufficient," in order that your team will shape it to itself and then actually use it.
Origin of the Material in This Book
The IBM Consulting Group asked me in 1991 to write a methodology for object--technology projects. Not knowing enough about methodologies at that time to make the crucial decisions, and at the suggestion of my boss, Kathy Ulisse,2 I started interviewing project teams. What they told me was very different from what I had been reading in the books. In particular, they stressed aspects not covered in the methodology texts: close communication, morale, access to end users, and so on. It was not long before these issues separated in stark contrast the successful projects I visited from the failing ones. I came to see these issues, and not the design techniques, as the key to reaching a successful project outcome.
I got to try these ideas out as lead consultant on a $15 million, fixed-price, fixed-scope project of forty-five people. The ideas worked as advertised (coupled with a lot of creativity along the way), and showed themselves as core success factors. I wrote up the lessons learned from the project interviews and that project in Surviving Object-Oriented Projects (Cockburn 1998).3
One particular triplet showed up repeatedly: colocation of the team, frequent delivery, and access to an expert user. The differences in results between projects that did and didn't do these far exceeded any other short list of practices. This book builds from that triplet.
The projects in my career have generally been of the fixed-price, fixed-scope variety. People usually underbid on these projects, which means that the only way the team can deliver on time is by being very creative with their development process. Unlike most of the other authors of the Agile Development Manifesto, I came to the agile principles through the need for efficiency, not the need to handle rapidly changing requirements.
As a result, Crystal Clear is well suited to the fixed-price context. If you are in such a situation, use the planning, communication, and reporting mechanisms I describe to meet your (probably unrealistic) deadline, and just be careful not to change the requirements at the start of every iteration. If you have an exploratory project in which the requirements are unknown or fluid, that is fine. Then allow the requirements to move at the start of each iteration.
Crystal Clear in the Crystal Family
Crystal is a family of methodologies with a common genetic code, one that emphasizes frequent delivery, close communication and reflective improvement. There is no one Crystal methodology. There are different Crystal methodologies for different types of projects. Each project or organization uses the genetic code to generate new family members.
The name "Crystal" comes from my characterization of projects along two dimensions, size and criticality, matching that of minerals, color and hardness (see Figure 7-1).
Larger projects, which require more coordination and communication, map to darker colors (clear, yellow, orange, red, and so on). Projects for systems that can cause more damage need added hardness in the methodology, as well as more validation and verification rules. A quartz methodology is suited to a few developers creating an invoicing system. The same team controlling the movement of boron rods in a nuclear reactor needs a diamond methodology—one calling for repeated checks on both the design and the implementation of their algorithms.
I characterize Crystal methodologies by color, according to the number of people being coordinated: Clear is for collocated teams of 8 or fewer people, Yellow is for teams of 10–20 people, Orange is for 20–50 people, Red is for 50–100 people, and so on, through Maroon, Blue, and Violet. Crystal Orange is described in Surviving Object-Oriented Projects (Cockburn 1998), and its variant Crystal Orange/Web is described in Agile Software Development (Cockburn 2002). I find that, except on life-critical projects, people can add in the verification activities through the methodology shaping and tuning workshops.4
Crystal's genetic code is made up of:
The economic-cooperative game model
Selected priorities
Selected properties
Selected principles
Selected sample techniques
Project examples
The economic-cooperative game model says that software development is a series of "games" whose moves consist of nothing else besides inventing and communicating, which is typically resource limited. Each game in the series has two goals that compete for resources: to deliver the software in this game and to set up for the next game in the series. The game never repeats, so each project calls for strategies slightly different from all previous games. The economic-cooperative game model...
