Agile Software Development: Best Practices for Large Software Development Projects

Software Development is moving towards a more agile and more flexible approach. It turns out that the traditional "waterfall" model is not supportive in an environment where technical, financial and strategic constraints are changing almost every day. But what is agility? What are today’s major approaches? And especially: What is the impact of agile development principles on the development teams, on project management and on software architects? How can large enterprises become more agile and improve their business processes, which have been existing since many, many years? What are the limitations of Agility? And what is the right balance between reliable structures and flexibility? This book will give answers to these questions. A strong emphasis will be on real life project examples, which describe how development teams have moved from a waterfall model towards an Agile Software Development approach.

About the Authors

Dr. Thomas Stober received a master degree from the University of Karlsruhe and a Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. After 5 years of research at the Fraunhofer-Institute IPA, where he focused on mobile computing and information logistics, he joined IBM's Pervasive Computing Division in 1998. As a technical leader and architect, Thomas developed smart card technology, data synchronization solutions, and was a member of several related standardization activities. During the last couple of years, he has been working for Lotus in Westford, Massachusetts and Boeblingen, Germany.

Thomas is the lead architect for the WebSphere Portal Foundation and is a recognized expert on strategic topics like Internet Portals, Web 2.0, and enterprise collaboration. In particular, Thomas is the key driver for introducing agile development practices into the Portal organization.

Thomas publishes articles and books and presents his work regularly on conferences and at university lectures. Together with Uwe, he has published the Pervasive Computing Handbook.

Uwe Hansmann is currently the Release Manager for WebSphere Portal. Uwe has 20 years of experience in software development. He joined IBM in 1993 as a developer using object-oriented concepts development software running on OS/2. He soon led various projects and teams within IBM's Software Group on topics like Smart Cards, Pervasive Computing, or synchronization. During the last couple of years, he led large product development projects at IBM that used agile software development methods like the development and release of WebSphere Portal 6.1.

He has also works directly and very closely with some major customers and was the Secretary of the Open Services Gateway Initiative. Uwe received a Master of Science from the University of Applied Studies of Stuttgart in 1993 and an MBA from the University of Hagen in 1998. He is a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP) as well as an IBM-certified Executive Project Manager.

Uwe is also the co-author of Smart Card Application Development Using Java, as well as SyncML - Synchronizing and Managing Your Mobile Data.