In February of 2001, a small group of people who were passionate about software development met at the Snowbird ski resort near Salt Lake City, Utah. At this famous meeting, the Agile Manifesto was born. A November 2001 meeting in Chicago led to the incorporation of Agile Alliance “to provide an unbiased forum within which the community can freely work to discuss, promote, and improve agile development processes.”1 Both before and after these momentous events, many people worked tirelessly to change the frame through which software development is perceived and the way in which software developers work. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, agile development approaches have become mainstream methods, and the more urgent problem these days is learning how to reap the benefits of agile development beyond the low-hanging fruit.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to those who had the vision and courage to lead the way, and to the many who have subsequently become instrumental in growing agile methods into an effective framework for software and system development. Our work truly stands on the shoulders of giants.
While we were writing this book, the agile and lean community characteristically came to our aid with insightful reviews, comments, and corrections. The people who helped us out are too numerous to mention, and there is always the fear that by naming a few, we will leave out others who should also be mentioned. However, we will take that chance as we express special gratitude to those whose words or efforts are specifically cited in this book.
Heartfelt thanks go to Dottie Acton for writing the foreword for this book; we sincerely appreciate her support. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Ted Rivera, Paul Gibson, and Sue McKinney for helping us understand Agile@IBM and prepare the case study in Chapter 6. We also thank Helen and Charlie for telling their stories. Thanks to Maria Wesslegård, Johan Nordin, and Daniel Eriksson, who showed us what life was like in the real world and convinced us that a book on lean leadership should be written. We wrote the book with Maria in mind and tried to make it useful to people in her leadership role.
Thanks to Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin for their insightful value stream map and the long discussions we had about practical approaches to improvement; and to Mr. Nobuaki Katayama, Chisako Katayama, and Kenji Hiranabe for helping us understand the role of a chief engineer at Toyota. Thanks to Bob Martin for gathering thoughts of industry leaders on clean code, and to Bjarne Stroustrup, Grady Booch, Dave Thomas, Michael Feathers, and Ward Cunningham for their insights on this topic. Thanks to Barry Boehm for letting us publish his historical graphs and for his encouragement. And thanks also to Kent Beck, our series editor, for his support.
Thanks to Jason Yip, Arun Batchu, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Masayuki Yamaguchi, and John Shook for key insights. And a special thanks to those who graciously allowed us to use their words in sidebars: Ola Ellnestam, Samuel Crescêncio, Carsten Jakobsen, Tomo Lennox, Olve Maudal, and Tom Stephen.
We had many reviewers who contributed excellent comments that helped to shape this book, and, of course, picking out a few to thank always leaves us at risk of forgetting someone. But we’ll take the risk and extend special appreciation to the contributions of Rick Mugridge, Ryan Martens, Hubert Smits, Dustin Poppendieck, Bob Corrick, and Bas Vodde.
Finally, thanks to the Addison-Wesley team members, especially Greg Doench, for all of their help and support in publishing this book.
1. From the Agile Alliance Bylaws.