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Reviewer: Harekrishna Misra

Aligning business processes with information technology is an important activity in an organization, and expectations for it are high. Traditionally, application software development projects lead this alignment, with active support from prominent stakeholders like system architects and planners, system vendors, application software developers, and users. There are various software engineering process and product models and methods through which all the stakeholders contribute substantially during the life cycle of the project. But the success of a project lies in usability, the usefulness of the product developed during the process, and how users define its success. User-defined success is a relative term that is very difficult to measure, since user requirements change in organizations as they grow in size and complexity. Today, most organizations focus on integrated versions of applications to manage complex online transactions and facilitate the optimization of resources. These user-centric demands have become dynamic; they have grown in size and complexity. Thus, process rule-based products, which have already been developed and deployed, are facing obsolescence within a short period of time after deployment. An ongoing challenge for system planners and application developers is to maintain agility in the alignment process. Agile development processes are gaining momentum in the present context to meet new challenges. Agile development is often claimed to be suitable for small projects, simple problems, and particularly for the early phases of a software product. Agile system planners often also worry about the suitability of agile approaches to scale up to higher volumes and manage the complexity of development processes at the enterprise level. This book seeks to provide insight into some of the challenges and to discuss adoptable best practices for deploying agile methods at the enterprise level. Therefore, it is timely, and the real-life lessons shared by the author add to its relevance. The book provides the tenets of software engineering process-modeling approaches, keeping the waterfall model in the background. It also provides a very good account of the evolution of the agile methods that would generate interest for most readers. It presents the reader with much simpler terms to elucidate comparative features between traditional waterfall methods with regard to agile methods (rational unified process, extreme programming, Scrum, and so on). However, many of the theoretical explanations provided in the book could frustrate the reader. This book provides insight into the architectural issues needed to appreciate the relevance of agile methods at the enterprise level. Architectures provide the foundation for intercomponent relationships and directions for growth. The book offers readers a solid understanding of connecting architectural issues with agile requirement planning. In addition, project metrics are developed and explained to elucidate implementation issues during the management of agile method-driven software projects. A separate chapter on these metrics is an added strength. However, this book seems to be heavily oriented toward the management of software development organizations. It also focuses on development teams and their role in agile method-driven projects. Such teams in development organizations are expected to understand the architectures of the client organization and appreciate user-level metrics to measure usability. Therefore, it would have been useful to provide some experiential explanations through case studies to appreciate user-driven project metrics and measurement issues. A case-based comparative analysis between traditional and agile methods could have provided a comprehensive understanding of the three themes of the book: scaling best practices, maintaining quality and productivity during scale-up, and managing scale-up through iterative and incremental approaches. The book is highly recommended for readers eager to learn about agile methods and relate them with traditional software engineering process models. It will be helpful to system architects and planners who want to learn about various enterprise-level issues while adopting agile or traditional methods. It is often said that no quality-ensured process can guarantee a quality product. This may apply to agile methods as well. The traditional methods that delivered most of the products we use today are now being challenged. But this challenge is based on quality, user experience, and usability. Observing user experiences is a challenging task, and agile methods are no exception in facing such a challenge. This book will certainly assist development teams in deploying agile methods to meet dynamic user-centered challenges at the enterprise level. Online Computing Reviews Service