
The art of agile development
by James Shore · first published 2007
33mentions
13recommended by
19HN commenters
2008–2025first – last mentioned
68% recommend32% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical, methodology-aware guide to agile practices, good as a first agile book. Helps teams organize projects, check whether adoption is working, and avoid cargo-cult agile; take what fits and skip the rest.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…Man-Month" by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. is a classic book on software project management. It covers topics such as the challenges of managing large, complex projects, and how to avoid common pitfalls. "The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore and Shane Warden is a practical guide to agile software development, which emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and continuous improvement. "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free…
on “Ask HN: Reading material on how to be a better software engineer?” ↗"The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore & Shane Warden As for individuals it works, but you'll have to pick out the parts that you really could make use of and leave other parts to the wayside. I'd say it helps organize your…
on “Ask YC: Good agile book?” ↗1. The Mythical Man Month (Some interesting essays, some dated) 2. The Art of Agile Development (First agile book to read, certainly interesting) 3. Object Oriented Perl (Very interesting stuff... I've read it a few times but keep flipping open to chapters and being in awe of the cleverness of…
on “What are you reading?” ↗…http://amzn.to/9B7hJg, which talks about various practices in a fairly methodology independent way. The reason I really like it is that it has some excellent pointers for checking when adoption is/isn't working. * "The Art of Agile Development" is another nice book http://amzn.to/bksP7T in a similar vein. This is more process-prescriptive though (they're talking about a varient of Extreme Programming) I'd also also take the time to read the…
on “Ask HN: My University's library needs suggestions for books on Agile Development” ↗We used to. I recommend the book: The Art of Agile Development In there, the author starts by saying,"there is no silver bullet"...and it's true.
on “Does anyone in industry religiously use scrum at their workplace?” ↗The Art of Agile Development. It's published by O'Reilly and quite a bit of it is excerpted on my blog at https://www.jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/ .
on “The art of interrupting software engineers” ↗…of cases you can build something for the user quickly, even when you initially think you can't. This isn't even my opinion, it's the observed practice of a whole generation of developers. Read "The Art of Agile Development" if you want to know more, it's extremely helpful if you're trying to understand how to achieve the delivery I'm talking about.
on “Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others” ↗Just buy these two books. You won't use everything in both, but they will give you enough ideas and perspective to make them both very worth reading: "Making Things Happen" - OReilly "The Art of Agile Development"
on “ASK HN: How to plan and manage a large web project?” ↗…mess or because bugs will pop up since there wasn't time to have proper automated and acceptance testing. Books I found useful, although I'm not a CTO myself (a bit methodology dependant, sorry): The Art of Agile Development (O'Reilly) Agile Estimating and Planning (Prentice Hall)
on “New CTO. How do I manage developers and report to CEO?” ↗Reply to bcobb: I agree that Working Effectively with Legacy Code is great. It's been as revolutionary for our team as The Art of Agile Development. The big piece that we're missing is how to apply agile practices consistently when our velocity varies so significantly because of legacy code. Feathers' book gave us a long-term path to getting out…
on “Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed” ↗…on Software Don't Make Me Think The Lean Startup The Mythical Man Month The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO The Design of Everyday Things Escape Velocity Competition Demystified The Art of Agile Development
on “Ask HN: Suggestions for product management courses for a software engineer?” ↗I'm almost finished with The Art of Agile Development(https://www.programmingbooks.dev/#the-art-of-agile-developme...). I started reading 3 weeks ago and it's a chunky books. It's a great book and covers a lot of good agile ideas and practices.
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading, since when?” ↗…claiming I find are true, so far. It’s different, but it has almost eliminated all lead and wait time for us which I consider to be a huge obstacle for effectiveness. I got convinced by The book The Art of Agile Development (https://programmingbooks.dev/#the-art-of-agile-development) where he describes mob programming as an easy mode for collaboration. We used the book Code with the Wisdom of the Crowd (https://programmingbooks.dev/more/#code-with-the-wisdom-of-t...)…
on “Ask HN: Have you tried mob programming?” ↗That is cargo cult agile. I encourage you to read 'the art of agile development' as they do provide some guidance around that. But if there is micromanaging going on your org has ignored one of the core principles. "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment…
on “Agile Cult” ↗…screencast is Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, a series for professional JavaScript developers. It's available at http://www.letscodejavascript.com. I'd love to hear your feedback. [2] My book is The Art of Agile Development. It's been out for over five years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it. [3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226…
on “Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?” ↗