My Agile Reading List

Someone asked me today for recommendations for books to read on agile. I came up with the following reading list, which interestingly does not include any books with the words agile or SCRUM in the title.

Continuous Delivery

Though this is a relatively new book, I believe it is the one that has been the most beneficial to me as a developer. All of my jobs in software development have had significant operations components: building and packaging releases, automated testing, configuration management and deployments. Bringing the spirit of automation and repeatability to this, with the aim of delivering faster, more repeatably and with less effort, is a huge area of low hanging fruit for software teams.

Growing Object Oriented Software

I have used test driven development for a number of years, but this book really brought home how we can relentlessly use tests to optimise the design, clarity and quality of the code and eventually the products that we are building. I believe that automated tests at multiple levels of abstraction are absolutely fundamental to agile delivery of software, and that you need to adopt test driven development as a fundamental practice if you are going to deliver complex software as early and often as agile and continuous delivery imply.

The Pragmatic Programmer

This is the first book I read which made me start to think of development as a process that is much bigger than simply writing code. Things such as your tools and environment, your team, your testing strategies, your attitudes and your approaches to problem solving and learning. All of the items discussed in the book are fertile areas for optimisation which can provide a net benefit to your software product and team. The Pragmatic Programmer is all about working smarter, not harder, which is something I try to keep at the front of my mind during the day job.

Peopleware

Peopleware concentrates on the human side of software development work and backs up the claims with reference to real data. Most technical people and managers would think it was a little fluffy to talk about concerns such as how the office is laid out, working hours, the need for flow and dress codes, but software development is a team sport and the human factor is always more important than we give it credit for. By improving tools you can improve productivity in small increments, but by improving the situation, working practices and motivation of your people, you will likely gain outsized benefits for relatively small investments.

The Goal

This is not a software book but focuses on system operations and systems thinking. If we step back and look at most working software teams, they are generally part of some broader system providing inputs (requirements, bugs) and outputs (working software, bugs). Like any system, this broad end to end process incorporates bottlenecks, constraints, feedback loops and inefficiencies. By stepping back and viewing the system, we can optimise it and smooth out the workloads, making quite substantial improvements to the throughput of the system and the quality of the outputs.

Release It

This is a really readable and very broad book that brings home the fact that your application lives and operates in some context that can cause you unexpected problems: a changing user base, integration points, components outside of your control and more. As junior developers we think that writing software is simply about writing code, when in reality it is the kind of stuff and scenarios discussed in this book which end up giving you more problems, and which can make or break the success and perception of your application.

So that is my list. I think what all of these titles have in common is that they are all about the things that developers need to spend time on that are slightly around the edge of the act of physically writing code. All of this extraneous stuff has huge potential for optimisation, but has traditionally just been left to evolve without any critical thought and with minimal attempt to improve upon. These books are great starting points toward this broader focus.

For more on the same themes, read what agile software development means and tips on continuous delivery. The books themselves are easy to find through the Pragmatic Bookshelf and any good technical bookshop.