The most recommended agile software development books

The second book from Gregory and Crispin brought me up-to-date on the different trends in the Agile world, ten years after having delved into their first book.

How do you share the quality mindset in a DevOps culture? What about Design Thinking? With many more examples from the industry, the two authors made me curious about some of the things that I had ignored until I read their book.

There are many creative professions where the performers practice their skills more often compared to the actual time they do the actual work.

Software development is widely considered as a creative profession. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fall into the category of professions where its practitioners hone their skills. This book discusses a coaching strategy where software teams can periodically practice and improve their technical practices.

“Samman” is the Swedish word for “together”. Organisations that invest in technical coaching increase their business success. This book is a real eye-opener for anyone who likes to improve their approach to team coaching. It lays out the groundwork for improving the technical practices of software teams. 

This book is the software industry’s “bible” on how to start software development projects. 

It explains how to conduct up-front user research, before design, prototyping, and coding start. User research, followed by analysis of your findings, is how you determine requirements and figure out what features or improvements are needed and which are most important. 

This book presents a collection of methods for doing that. You probably won’t need every method described this book on every project, but having Holtzblatt and Beyer’s toolkit of user-research and analysis methods available when needed is valuable. 

I read it several times, and now several of its methods are baked into my normal design process.

This is the most recent book I'm recommending, and it’s also more than just a book on Test-Driven Development. I often proclaim that Test-Driven Development and software design are two sides of the same coin. One cannot separate one from the other. So learning about Test-Driven Development also means that one has to learn about software design principles. This book teaches both. The first part of the book is all about Test-Driven Development, while the remainder of the book also touches on object calisthenics, refactoring, code smells, design patterns, the S.O.L.I.D. principles, connascence, the four elements of simple design, and much more. Whether you’re new to programming software, or whether you’re a seasoned developer, there’s much to learn from this book.      

When agile software development emerged, many developers saw it as a way to end the era of death march projects. The more "agile" caught on, the less it looked like the original concept.

In the face of the corruption of the movement, Joy Of Agility is a wonderful return to positive ideas that make you agile, not hasty. As we all push back against the industrial complex that has appropriated the agile movement, this book is the white wizard shining blinding light that chases away the monsters.

Gerald M. – Jerry – Weinberg is my most-often quoted author.

Having spent more than 50 years in the software world, Jerry was able to write in a timeless manner about the lessons he learned. Over the years, he collected more and more stories he survived from, including all aspects that brings software from an idea to a product that everyone can use.

In this first volume in his Quality Software Management series, he will extend your perspective with Causal-Loop Diagrams and thereby introduce you to the world of Thinking in Systems.

The takeaways from his stories are fostered in easy-to-remember laws and principles that he gives you as a free takeaway summary in the end as well. Extend your perspective on managing for quality rather than staying oblivious.

It may seem strange to include a jobseeker’s guide in a list of leadership books, but Agile Unemployment is the resource for anyone faced with the hardest leadership task of all: leading yourself through a time of trial.

Sabina Sulat has been there—on both sides of the HR desk for “that conversation”—and she offers her well-earned wisdom with deep candor, much-needed encouragement, and straight-shooting practicality. In my early career days, I always found the “What color is your parachute” genre pretty useless, not to mention incredibly depressing. I wish I’d had Sulat’s sound guidance back then; it would have helped me lean in, out, up, down, and sideways with far more grace and optimism.

Many agile projects employ user stories as a way to represent requirements rather than a more traditional approach combining use cases and functional requirements. I favor the latter approach for several reasons. Nonetheless, user stories are well established in the agile development world, and if you wish to learn about them, there’s no better author to read than Mike Cohn. Cohn describes how to craft user stories well and how they fit into the agile development process.

This book gives the philosophical underpinning for why creating a leadership development culture in all parts of your organization is essential for working in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) business landscape. And, it shows you how to do it with specific practices and new-mindset concepts. It is geared toward organizations with Agile ways of working in the environment, but is also useful if Agile is not present. I especially enjoy the way several theories of adult development are interwoven in this book which makes using them to guide leadership development strategies (your own and others) simpler and more immediately applicable.

“Good agile testing is good context-driven testing applied in an agile context.”

I recall reading through the authors’ lessons on software testing at about the same time I dived into more agile topics. Lessons Learned in Software Testing helped me keep the connection towards more traditional contexts – more so since I was still working in a more traditional context.

With their more than 100 lessons some of them applied to me, others did not. I am sure, other readers will find the same in their context.