An Executive's Guide to Disciplined Agile: Winning the Race to Business Agility

The agile community has determined how to build and then continually improve very high-performance software development teams. This is akin to creating a race car engine and then evolving it to get more power, better fuel efficiency, and greater speed. Sadly in many cases we take these great engines, put them into an organizational tractor, and then complain that we’re not winning the race. What we need to do is take our great race car engines (our development teams), put them into a race car (a DevOps ecosystem), have a great pit crew and driver (an effective IT organization), and then provide somewhere to race (an organization that can leverage IT to make money). That’s what this book is all about – Moving from optimizing team performance to optimizing the entire enterprise.

Business agility – being an adaptive, lean, responsive, and learning organization – is the race that enterprises need to win today. Yet there is no quick fix, no silver bullet, to attain business agility. This is a multi-year journey requiring hard work, experimentation, and most importantly a willingness to improve.

The Disciplined Agile toolkit lowers risks and provides a path to accelerate your journey to business agility. The toolkit is unique in that it is the only one that puts all the pieces together into a cohesive enterprise roadmap for business agility transformation.

This book begins with an overview of the challenges and opportunities that organizations face. We then describe seven principles that provide the underpinnings of Disciplined Agile. Then the book works through Disciplined Agile Delivery (how to build a world-class engine), Disciplined DevOps (the race car), Disciplined Agile IT (the race car and its team), and what it means to be a Disciplined Agile Enterprise (the racing business). The book ends with a plan for starting with an Agile transformation and then evolving into a long-term continuous improvement strategy.

Do you have the discipline it takes to win the race to business agility?

Scott W. Ambler is the Senior Consulting Partner of Scott Ambler + Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organization level. Scott is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. He is the (co-)author of several books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott blogs about DAD at DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com. Scott is also a Founding Member of the Disciplined Agile Consortium (DAC), the certification body for Disciplined Agile. Mark Lines is Managing Partner at Scott Ambler. He is an Enterprise Agile Coach and co-creator of the Disciplined Agile Delivery framework. Mark is co-author with Scott Ambler of Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise and an Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery. Mark helps clients around the world transform from traditional to lean and agile enterprises. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and blogs about DAD at DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com. He is also a founding member and President of the Disciplined Agile Consortium (DAC).