Agile: An Executive Guide gives you the bottom line information that you need to harness the business value benefits of Agile within your organization, and generate significantly greater returns on your IT investment. Since the 1990s, Agile methodologies have provided the IT industry with an approach to software development that focuses on the quality, relevance and extensibility of software solutions. These methodologies overcome traditional software development issues by positioning IT resources to regularly deliver high business-value outcomes; they replace upfront investment in software solutions with incremental investment based on proven business value returns; most critically, they protect the organization from wasting money on software solutions that will only need to be reworked or replaced in the future because they do not meet the needs of the intended recipient. This book has been written with only one objective: to provide you with the information

Agile: An Executive Guide gives you the bottom-line information that you need to harness the business benefits of Agile within your organization.

Agile: An Executive Guide describes Agile methods in clear business language specifically written for professionals. It will help you make realistic business-driven decisions on whether Agile methods are appropriate for your organisation; whether you are looking to reduce your IT overheads, provide better software solutions to your clients, or have more control over your IT expenditures. This guide provides practical, proven ways to introduce, incorporate and leverage Agile methods to maximise your business returns.

This guide will help you make realistic decisions on whether Agile methodologies are appropriate for your organisation; it also suggests ways of introducing, incorporating and leveraging these methodologies.

The agile community has figured out how to build and then continually improve very high-performance software development teams. This is akin to creating a race car engine and then evolving it to get more power, better fuel efficiency, and greater speed. Sadly in many cases we take these great engines, put them into an organizational tractor, and then complain that we're not winning the race. What we need to do is take our great race car engines (our development teams), put them into a race car (a DevOps ecosystem), have a great pit crew and driver (an effective IT organization), and then provide somewhere to race (an organization that can leverage IT to make money). That's what this book is all about - Moving from optimizing team performance to optimizing the entire enterprise. Business agility - being an adaptive, lean, responsive, and learning organization - is the race that enterprises need to win today. Yet there is no quick fix, no silver bullet, to attain business agility. This is a multi-year journey requiring hard work, experimentation, and most importantly a willingness to improve. The Disciplined Agile framework lowers risks and provides a path to accelerate your journey to business agility. The framework is unique in that it is the only one that puts all the pieces together into a cohesive enterprise roadmap for business agility transformation. This book begins with an overview of the challenges and opportunities that organizations face. We then describe seven principles that provide the underpinnings of the Disciplined Agile framework. Then the book works through Disciplined Agile Delivery (how to build a world-class engine), Disciplined DevOps (the race car), Disciplined Agile IT (the race car and its team), and what it means to be a Disciplined Agile Enterprise (the racing business). The book ends with a plan for starting with an Agile transformation and then evolving into a long-term continuous improvement strategy. Do you have the discipline it takes to win the race to business agility?

"With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as {28}Kanban in a box.