New Book: Agile Discovery & Delivery

I’m very pleased to announce that my new book comes out in June. It’s called Agile Discovery & Delivery: A Survival Guide for New Software Engineers & Entrepreneurs. The book is filled with agile software development knowledge. Knowledge I, as a hiring manager, wish every software engineer knew coming out of college. It’s also the book I wish I’d read as a new engineer many years ago. Unfortunately, most computer science degree programs still aren’t teaching enough agile collaboration best practices. I’m personally really excited to share this information with a new generation of engineers. I hope the book will help engineers hit the ground running and find healthy, fun places to work.

This book mirrors the Capstone course I’ve been teaching at UW-Madison since 2020. For those of us that have been agile coaches forever, you might get a few gems here and there from my book, but you probably know all of this stuff already. You’ve probably lived everything in here and learned it the hard way. This book is for people we work with. It gives newcomers the best practices we had to struggle to learn over many years.

Agile Discovery & Delivery Overview

The audience for Agile Discovery & Delivery is early-career software engineers that have been working five years or less. It’s also great for entrepreneurs starting their first tech company as I discuss various discovery techniques and ways to find product-market fit. In a nutshell, the book covers agile software development from start to finish — discovery to delivery.

It has three parts:

• Part I is a discussion about agile principles and what makes an agile team effective and fun to work on. I talk about iteration, customer feedback, engineering excellence, simplicity, continuous improvement, and all of the other agile principles that provide the backbone for a well-run software process. I also talk about cross-functional, empowered, dedicated teams. Then I touch on why they’re great and how engineers can find organizations that really embody the agile principles above.

• Part II is all about Product Discovery. How do we figure out what to build and what is an engineer’s role in that process? I define product-market fit and techniques for finding it like Lean Start-up, Design Thinking, and Google Design Sprints. We go through examples. I also talk about why it’s so important that companies do discovery work and that engineers are a part of the discovery process.

• Part III gets into what most people think of as “agile”: the frameworks and best practices for delivering in an agile environment. I discuss the two main frameworks engineers are bound to come across: Scrum and Kanban. Then, I dive into specific practices that many of my students have asked about or thought were really helpful like user stories (and how to break them down), pair/mob programming, code branching/merging, and test-driven development.

By the end of the book, new engineers and entrepreneurs know how to build an amazing and valuable product from discovery to delivery. I even stick a few important sections in the back about things I’m really passionate about like self-selecting teams and business agility.

Theory vs. Reality

That’s great, you might say, but that still doesn’t give engineers a real sense for how things happen in the “real world”. I know. The shiny, wonderful ideals of perfect agile teams go away the minute they get applied to a real product. And I think new engineers should know this. So, I try to cover some of what really happens with agile in the “real world”. Each section has three parts:

• Key Concepts: The basics of what new engineers need to know for each topic.
• Reality: How things actually work in the real world. Spoiler alert! Sometimes theory doesn’t make it through its first contact with an actual team.
• Survival Tips: Things you can do as an engineer to make your life easier.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a lot to do before June! My editor finishes this month. I finalize everything — graphics, content, structure — in May. While that’s happening, I’ll be sharing more about it on this blog. You’ll see some sample sections as well as the outline and other tidbits as we get closer to release. Please subscribe to receive the updates!

When Can I Pre-Order The Book?

May! I’ll post an update on the blog and my Books page in May when the book is ready for pre-order. Thanks for considering buying a copy! I’ve had a lot of interest from my beta readers (many brand new engineers and over 100 students from my class) and from parents whose kids are about to start a computer science degree or graduate with one. I can’t wait to share this with the world! Stay tuned!