Past Book Review (July 6, 2007): "Balancing Agility and Discipline"

Past book review (i.e. posted prior to starting this blog) for Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Barry Boehm and Richard Turner, Addison-Wesley/Pearson Education, 2003, reposted here:

Great text. I really enjoyed reading this book by Boehm and Turner. Especially enjoyable was reading Grady Booch's comment in his forward that "there's a delightful irony in the fact that the very book you are holding in your hands has an agile pair of authors yet requires three times as many forewards as you'd find in any normal book".

The material of this text is centered around the dimensions affecting method selection that the authors provide as the five critical factors involved in determining the relative suitability of agile or plan-driven methods in specific project situations. In most situations, the authors indicate that some mix of these methods will be needed after risk assessments are performed for each of the five factors.

The radar plots provided that depict different levels of these five factors for example projects aid in understanding how projects differ. What is unfortunate is that the metrics for each of these factors (personnel, dynamism, culture, size, and criticality) are not explained well. Size, the number of personnel working on any given project, is the only concrete metric.

However, I think the reader needs to understand that determining the level of each of the other four factors is really not meant to be exact. In fact, the presentation by the authors of various projects, although sometimes a bit detailed for the subject matter, help in the understanding that these metrics are relative.

For example, unless personality tests are administered to all project personnel, it can be quite difficult to determine the level of Culture (the percent who thrive on chaos versus order), but guestimating an approximate level for this factor is probably good enough to get a sense of whether agile or plan-driven methodologies are more appropriate.

Of the first few chapters of the text, I think the first two chapters that provide a background to the balancing agility and discipline problem are the most effective, followed by the chapter six summary chapter that lists the top conclusions of the discussion. The appendixes to this book, which comprise almost one-third of the text, are also very informative.

Thirteen software development methodologies are presented side-by-side in Appendix A to enable the ability to compare each, although admittedly some of the methodologies are covered more extensively than others. And in Appendix E, some interesting industry statistics are presented from various studies, including a discussion on how much architecting is enough for a particular project, although there is some overlap with the well-written, thorough, recently-released text by McConnell called "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" (see my review).

Overall, this book fits a gap on the software development bookshelf, and I am sure that other works of this genre will be released by other authors over the next couple years, as writing on this subject matter is still in its infancy.