At the end of the past century, the approaches and methodologies (Information Engineering, RUP, CMMI) that were trying to improve software development processes and projects had a huge documentation on how to do things, initially on large documents sets and then on CDs. Checklists were often used as gateways between project phases and you had to confirm that every goal of the phase has been addressed. Then came the Agile Manifesto that proposed a new approach preferring “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.

Some music loving readers could notice that this title is borrowed from a 1975′s Supertramp album. On the cover of this vinyl LP, you can see a guy taking a sunbath in a gray industrial landscape. According to the common interpretation, the term Software Engineering was coined just some years before this, in 1968 at the NATO Software Engineering Conference in Garmisch, Germany. The aim of this conference was already to tame the “software crisis”. Since this era, vinyls and Supertramp have mostly disappeared, but software development seems to have …

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Aspects of Kanban – Lean Worfklow Management
* Test Language – Introduction to Keyword Driven Testing
* A High Volume Software Product Line
* Better Requirements Definition Management is Better for Business
* The Core Protocols, an Experience Report – Tools for High Performance Teams
* Tool: eValid- Functional and Load Web Testing
* Tool: Hudson- Continuous Integration Server
* Tool: FitNesse – Test Cases Management
* Tool: VoodooMock – Mock Objects Framework …

The goal of this book is to propose a vision of Agile software development that goes behind the current practices, more specifically Scrum, to integrate the principles of Lean development. To achieve this objective, the authors draw on their own experience in Agile consulting.

When you start reading this book, you will quickly understand that the authors are affiliated with IBM. This is nothing wrong per se, but this seems to influence too much the vision that the book proposes, ignoring approaches proposed by others. Including “iterative” in the title seems here to be only a marketing trick used to make it catchy. They don’t give you a precise definition of “iterative”, saying rather than it is a “modern method” (Tom Gilb was talking about evolutionary development 30 years ago) and that iterative management …