 |
|
Title: Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for Extreme Programming and the Unified Process
ISBN: 0471202827
Author:
Scott W. Ambler
Ron Jeffries
Publicate Date: 2002-03-22
Publish: 2002-03-22
List Price: $45.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
 |
|
|
|
|
Amazon Lowest New Price: $20.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $18.22
Amazon Merchant Price: $34.62
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Customer Review: |
|
1: Pretty useless
Not much information other than what you can read on his website. I was looking for something much more prescriptive in terms of how to model in an agile way and how to communicate the model.
|
2: You can have way too much of a good thing
This is a mix of good, bad, and annoying
Good: the author really does know a lot about modeling (except data modeling, see "Bad") and gives good explanations and examples of many aspects of modeling at many stages in the development process. If you can plough through his 350+ pages, you will have found many stimulating and practical concepts and some good advice on implementing them.
A very good chapter is Chapter 29 - a discussion of how to implement Agile Modeling - or really, any agile practice - in a usually hostile world. Some battle scars showing here!
I also like that he does not consider the UML the be-all and end-all of modeling tools. Like him, I've found good use for the trusty old DFD (Data Flow Diagram) of the 70's, where appropriate.
And his overall message - that the agile approach can extend to your design and modeling task, not just code, and the implications for minimizing the documentation effort - is very strong.
I find his reference to quick diagrams "on the back of a napkin" a bit overdone. Sure, the quick informal diagram is excellent, but paper napkins are not the best medium! Hand-drawn on a piece of paper, or a card, sure...if you are discussing models in a bar or restaurant with that degree of focus...get a life!
Whiteboard and digital camera can certainly be used much more than they are. But the overall point is excellent: that when you are documenting (and he has some difficulty separating out "modeling" from "documenting" and acknowledges the problem) you are not creating the end-product, and there is a cost for that. "Travel light" - yes. As Einstein said "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Bad: his data model example is terrible. What's with adding surrogate keys to every table? This is a pernicious practice that has become all too common from people who never learned relational theory and try to fit relational into the object model. A giveaway is that he calls his "identity" columns "persistent object identifiers." Yes, sometimes they are necessary or useful, but in general the natural key is way better. In his Customer table, there is a customer number - but it's not the primary key, a pesky OID is! He himself acknowledges that this may give performance problems, or at least not be optimal. It implies more indexing and triggers...oh well, enough already. Just don't let RDBMS gurus like Fabian Pascal or Joe Celko see that chapter.
Slightly annoying: A few little niggles about English usage etc - by now you would think that any publisher's editor would know that "supersede" has no "c" in it, and that you can't be "reticent to" something - the word is "reluctant. Odd. On the other hand, thank goodness for someone who understands why it's "co-located" not the bizarre "collocated" that I see far too often.
Really annoying: Basically, Einstein's phrase above could have replaced about half the book. It's incredibly repetitious, and also over-organized, over-conceptualized, over-categorized, generally over-inflated. We need a discipline of Agile Communication! An end to ListMania! A thoroughgoing refactoring of the contents is in order. His four Parts and thirty Chapters contain massive redundancy. The matching of agile modeling precepts, in finest detail, to the equally excruciating detail of the RUP, is really an unnecessary exercise. We don't have TIME for this!
As someone else said, a short White Paper could have replaced the entire book. Hence the two stars, good though some of the material is.
|
3: Modeling of Business Systems in the "real world"
Agile modeling is about the latest approach to the modeling of Business Information Systems. This book focuses on the Agile method and also describes how to incorporate the strong points of UML. The book will be an aid to "survive" in the jungle of developing modern BI Systems. There are IT decision makers that are not aware of Agile, since Agile is a mind shift, be careful how you introduce the new ideas to these decision makers. The book is for the IT professional (all levels), who wants to be in the forefront of software development. If you are in the "nuts and bolts" of systems development, do yourself a favour and look also at "Agile Database Techniques", by the same author.
|
4: I recommend this book
Good book with lots of behind the scenes process info about how to implement agile modeling techniques. If you are looking for step by step instructions to modeling or how to model, look elsewhere. It doesn't cover specific modeling, but techniques. Some of the techniques are common sense, but there were lots of suggestions of how to apply them in a difficult political environment. I did not completely agree with the often repeated
statement that unless you apply all of the techniques you cannot truly claim agile modeling success, which I think is a somewhat arrogant statement. Agile modeling is a huge cultural change and implementing as much as possible, if not all, is still a great idea.
|
5: If you live in a world of too much documentation, read this
For those few places left that steep themselves in documentation and don't have a legally-required reason to do so (do they exist?), this book should help motivate why producing too much documentation and doing too much modeling up front can hurt rather than help. Even for a company that sees itself as lightweight, he's got some rough assessments you can do to see if you're overdoing things, which were relevant even where I work.The only bad thing is that it was a very theory and ideal oriented book. It didn't contain concrete examples of what Agile Modeling would look like on a real project, how it would feel, and how what models were produced would evolve. This made it a bit difficult to verify my interpretation of the book.
|
|
|
|
|
