Harry Grinnell, who was co-author James Coplien’s grandfather, was a
life-long postal worker, but many of his life’s accomplishments can be
found in his avocations. His father was an alcoholic and his mother a
long-suffering religious woman. Grandpa Harry dropped out of school
after eighth year to take a job in a coal yard to put food on the table after
much of the family budget had gone to support his father’s habit. Harry
would go on to take up a job as a postal worker in 1925 at the age of 19, and
married Jim’s grandmother the next year. He faced the changes of the Great
Depression, of two world wars, and of great economic and social change.
You’re probably wondering why an Agile book starts with a story
about Grandpa Harry. It’s because his avocation as a master craftsman
in woodworking together with his common-sense approach to life offer
a fitting metaphor for the Agile and Lean styles of development. This is
a book about common sense. Of course, one person’s common sense is
another one’s revelation. If you are just learning about Agile and Lean, or
are familiar only with their pop versions, you may find new insights here.
Even if you know about Agile and Lean and are familiar with architecture,
you’re likely to learn from this book about how the two ideas can work
and play together.
More and more Agile projects are seeking architectural roots as they struggle with complexity and scale - and they're seeking lightweight ways to do it
-
Still seeking? In this book the authors help you to find your own path
-
Taking cues from Lean development, they can help steer your project toward practices with longstanding track records
-
Up-front architecture? Sure. You can deliver an architecture as code that compiles and that concretely guides development without bogging it down in a mass of documents and guesses about the implementation
-
Documentation? Even a whiteboard diagram, or a CRC card, is documentation: the goal isn't to avoid documentation, but to document just the right things in just the right amount
-
Process? This all works within the frameworks of Scrum, XP, and other Agile approaches
