I've been busy pretty much every weekend for the last 6 weeks, either visiting friends, family or knee deep in jobs around the flat. Unfortunately this has left me no time for coding which hurts, but on the bright side, over the last few weeks due to the journey time when travelling around England it has allowed me to catch up on some good reading. I have had a reading list either on-line or on paper for some time and this time has allowed me to nail through some good books and hopefully in-turn allowed me to try some new ideas and improve my overall agile practices. My reading list is available on git-hub @ https://github.com/jamesemorgan/reading-list
Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices
This
a great book in general. I've read it in bits over the last few years
and after reading several of the chapters again it is full of useful and
well documented code examples. I especially like the chapter on
patterns, it demonstrate some of the classic and not so often used
patterns demonstrating how and when to not use and use them. I've also
read some other work by Uncle bob, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship , which is another great read and one I would recommend to other software engineers.
Practices Of an Agile Developer
The book is a very easy and enjoyable read. I have been practising agile development since leaving university 3 years ago and I wish I have read this book on day one. Its got lots of well documented and easy to understand agile techniques and practices. Many of the practices and techniques highlighted I use in my current role but reading this book, if nothing else this has refreshed and highlighted areas I sometimes look over when working. Hopefully allowing me to improve my overall game at work and giving me much more confidence. My only issue is I should have read this afew years ago and it may have been more of a help.
Ship It
Originally it was boss which highlighted this book to me for reading but I am glad I have read it. It provides references to many agile practices as well as giving some very good all around advice to apply to varying situations when practising agile development and release cycles. Written in the classic prag-prog style the book is easy to read, short and full of information which is easy to consume. Tracer Bullet Development (TBD) is one development practice which was new to me and introduce by this book, one which I can see to be useful, maybe I will try this out when it seems applicable and introduce this to my colleagues. My only issue is when reading this book from back to front I found some topics where not covered is as much detail or as much depth as I wanted but the book never advertises itself to do this. I would recommend this book for people/teams who are newish to agile adoption.
So now I am full of agile ides and practices I will aim to be more productive and try to incorporate or tweak existing practices I follow and see if the benefits can bee seen. In the end one of the classic quotes from Ship It states:
"There are only two real questions your process must answer to:"
* Does it work for you?
* Is it suitable?
just linked this article on my facebook account. it’s a very interesting article for all.
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