Who Is Agile

by Yves Hanoulle, Andrea Chiou, Marcin Floryan

In 2011, the agile manifesto turned 10 years old. Some of the agile methodologies are even 5 to 10 year older. In the agile world, we pay a lot of attention to the people in the teams. Thanks to mailing lists and social media, agile leaders are very approachable. Yet we don't know them. This book gives you access to learn a little more about agilists. You will find all kinds of people in this book, people who have been on the Agile Alliance board, Gordon Pask Award winners, Scrum masters, Scrum trainers, people who started movements, people who organized agile conferences, famous authors, hard core teammembers, etc.
You will also read about people who don't consider themselves agilists. They are in this book because they have inspired agilists, and I dare to say that they actually agree with what I call an agile mindset.

All these people (89 in total) have 2 things in common: they are interesting people and they have remarkable stories.

I send them all the same set of questions and asked them to select an extra question from someone else.
The answers were posted on my blog. The book contains one extra answers, per person.

370 pages, ebook

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

As I have too many places to keep my bio uptodate, I decided to only keep it here
www.hanoulle.be/yves

Reviews

[Laurent · Rating 4 out of 5]

To really understand an idea, it's often useful to also understand who is behind it and what their personal history is. Yves is doing the Agile community a great service by placing the people who are advancing Agile ideas in the spotlight. "Who is agile" captures some of the feel of attending a good Agile conference, minus the sessions (but you can get plenty of those by looking at the contributors' blogs, slideshares, etc.). You meet people who have something in common with you - at least a topic of interest - and get to know how they are different from you; the personal parts that make them unique.

[Johanna Rothman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yves Hanoulle has edited a book, called Who Is agile? Full disclosure: I am in the book.

I love this book. Not because I am in it, but because of all the back-stories, the pictures, and the links. And, oh my goodness, the links.

I did not expect to love this book. I expected to like the book. I expected to learn something. I expected to entertain myself for an hour or two. After all, how interesting could it be? I'd been reading the Who Is... series on Yves' blog. Yes, I'd missed a couple of people, but really. Put all the blog posts together, and have a book? So Yves edited, and added more links and edited and added more links, and maybe I'd missed a few people, but really, a book? How compelling could that be?

Well, you should read this book. You will understand how agile has become as strong as it is, not because of the signatories of the manifesto, but because of those of us who use agile in our day-to-day lives. How we live it and use it in our teams and our work. Read about Lisa Crispin and how she paired with Janet Gregory.

Read about Bob Marshall, Nicole Belilos, George Dinwiddie, and Jutta Eckstein. And those are just the people I feel as if I already know. Look at their beautiful pictures. Read their back-stories. Get to know them as people. And then, click on all of the links.

What is truly valuable about this book is the links Yves has collected for each of us Who Is people. There are links to each person's web site, books, blog, videos, interesting stories, the list goes on. The links are what makes the book. Yves has created a collection unlike anything else I have seen.

Yves used Leanpub to create the book, which means you buy it now, and as he updates it, you get the updated version. What's not to love? You get a wonderful book now, you keep getting a wonderful book, you read lots of different perspectives on how we all got to be agilists, and, you get all of these links.

Buy the book. Smile as you read it. Sigh as you read the one "Who was." Laugh at the funny parts. Enjoy it. And, thank Yves for all the work. The links, my goodness, the links.

[Doc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has many excellent aspects to it. First, it is being "developed" in an agile manner. The content is being added both iteratively and incrementally, and there are new releases on a regular basis. As an experiment in publishing, it exposes a number of challenges for the readers, as well as the publishers.

As one reader observed, if you've read some of the content, it's hard to know what has changed between releases (there is a change log, but it's still challenging).

Second, the book contains outstanding content from some leading thinkers in the Agile community.

If you want to get to know some of these folks, and what they're thinking about, as well as how that reflects on the Agile community as a whole, this is a must-read book.

[Yves Hanoulle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is being written in an agile way.
You can buy it while it's being written.
(and get free updates every week)
https://leanpub.com/WhoIsAgile

This book is also being translated in:

German
Spanish
Catalan; Valencian
French
Russian
Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan

[Vladimir Tarasov · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best part of this book is that it's still in progress. However Yves decided to stop on 89 per Volume I, there will be the 2-nd volume and I hope the 3d and so on. It's a great job to connect people that way.

[Marcin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great book full of interesting personal stories of people who have stumbled across Agile software development and are true practitioners of this approach.