The Agile Samurai—a fierce software-delivery professional capable of dispatching the most dire of software projects, and the toughest delivery schedules, with ease and grace

Master Sensei

Many books I have read touched on the subject of Agile wither it was direct or indirect.

In the filed of software we keep on hearing this term and many teams have asked themselves (Are we being Agile?).

While a good part of us thinks as long as we work on some task management software (Jira,…) means we are being agile which probably end up with one huge task and a waterfall approach build with out proper understanding of Agile process it self.

I would not put myself out of that probability as I have developed many projects thinking I was being Agile as it requires a lot of self disciplines .

The Agile Samurai by (Jonathon Rasmusson) is one of those short yet deep enough to get you a good grasp on core idea of Agile, it goes through the history and why is it needed, explains that there is no one way rule and teams create there own version of it based on what they have in hand.

The book is divided into 5 major chapters each of explaining part of the Agile development life cycle, while the last major focused more on unit testing and best practices.

Each chapter goes to some problem Jonathon (Author) with a high level explanation and use of simple words he uniquely defines where Agile would fit in and fix the issue, at the end of each readers have to small chat with “Master Sensei” he would test our understanding of the issue talked about. (Thank you Master 🙂 )

Many of the concepts were not much new to me but one that I am trying to bring to the table each time is Inception Deck as we are in a filed were priories and tasks are ever changing and a lot of times ideas are miss interrupted between collages.

Having the inception deck helped so much to have a clear view to the path needed and to manage expectations as it was clear on what we are going to implement at current release and what are not going to do and shows how critical it is that everyone has a clear understanding of what we are trying to build.

For a full understanding of it read the book as it goes through each point by detail.

While the book has many of the same ideas as others it still has its own personal flavor that I would recommend reading through.