I recently read the book ‘Agile Software Requirements‘ by Dean Leffingwell.
I must admit, judging from the title, this is a book I wouldn’t have picked up. Whilst there’s always more to learn, I felt I knew enough about user stories and agile software requirements, at least for now!
But the book was recommended to me by Jim Highsmith when we were talking about Agile Programme and Portfolio Management. I was expressing a concern that I hadn’t really stumbled across a really good source of information on that topic, and felt this was a bit of a gap in the agile books and materials currently available.
So on Jim’s recommendation, I purchased and read Dean’s book.
And I’m very pleased I did!
Although I was already familiar with most of the concepts in the book, this is the first book I’ve read that really delivers such a comprehensive view of how to roll agile practices up to programme level and beyond that to project portfolio level.
In my opinion it stops a bit short on the areas of project governance and the kinds of things an agile PMO might want to know, but it’s certainly the most complete piece of work I’ve read in a long while.
One of my personal criticisms of agile books is that they are generally very specialised. In other words, each book is focused on a fairly narrow topic, so you have to read quite a lot of books to get a really good grasp of all the principles and practices. This is one book that I think you can read to get a really good overview of most agile techniques, regardless of specific methodology.
Better than that, for larger organisations, it provides some really good advice for how to scale agile practices up , from small, individual and independent teams, to larger inter-dependent programme teams, right the way up to unrelated portfolios of projects.
Here’s the link – Agile Software Requirements by Dean Leffingwell
Kelly.