The Agile Codex: Re-inventing Agile Through the Science of Invention and Assembly - Softcover

Michael McCormick is VP of Engineering at Salesforce.com and CTO of Mobile and Connected Devices at Salesforce.org. Michael holds several engineering patents in mobile, IoT and microservices systems design and wrote a top 10 iPhone app (Photography, 2011). A lover of language, Michael knows English, Spanish, French, German, Norwegian and a little bit of Hindi. A composer of music, he plays classical and electric guitar, bass and piano and he has also been known to sing. With his family, he enjoys playing music, strategy card games, biking, playing outside, traveling, reading out loud and watching 80s movies. Michael values finding the hidden gems, and turning disparate skill sets into creative innovation. You can find more of Michael’s writing on Forbes.com.

Apply the industrial engineering science of invention and assembly to how software is described, planned, and built, allowing you to be free to flex your practices according to your needs, putting principle over habit and rules.

Reading about Agile practices is like reading diet advice. Everything sounds unique and good; everything starts with good intentions. Then reality sets in. Organizations adapt their practices, but lose sight of grounding principles. A bias toward ceremonies, metrics, and recipes comes at the expense of efficiently getting the real work done. Managers and developers are incentivized to game the system. Organizational metrics become detached from the reality of what is being delivered and how.

The Agile Codex shows you how to describe a software project as an acyclic dependency tree of sized work items, scoped to be operated on by one software engineer each and completed within a week. It provides Open Source tooling to help you visualize, sequence and assign these work items to account for risk and increase predictability in your delivery times. You’ll see the value of doing this as it applies to efficiently planning and adjusting software projects in the face of learning and change. Finally, the book covers the collaborative agile principles required to bring this skill set and practice to a software team.

Throughout the book you’ll be reminded that software engineering is not a rote task - it is primarily a skilled, creative act. As such, you’ll see that we need to account for the space needed to research, plan, create, and adjust. The Agile practices serving the codex deal with this intersection between the engineering problem of software delivery flow, and the human reality of how work is described, owned, executed, and transitioned from one state to another.

Everything an agile team does must serve the codex. The creation and the care and feeding of this structured tree of work sets the framein which all other team actions take place and against which all successes or failures can be evaluated.