In this interview taken by InfoQ's Deborah Hartmann during the Agile 2007 conference, James Shore, a prominent figure of the Agile community, talks about the book “The Art of Agile Development” that he and Shane Warden wrote. The book was not yet published at the time when the interview was made, and James offers a valuable introduction to the book touching various aspects of Agile development.
James considers the book as helpful for developers and teams which have heard of Agile, got interested about it and want to start learning and practicing it. He talks how he and Shane compiled a long list of about 200 Agile techniques, values and ideas, and aggregated them into 17 principles grouped into 5 categories: Improve the Project, Rely on People, Eliminate Waste, Deliver Value and Seek Technical Excellence. He gives some details on how to Eliminate Waste and Seek Technical Excellence.
James also says the book is not offering mainly an Agile methodology, but rather advice on creating successful software. According to James, we need to be successful in the following areas: technical, organizational and personal. We need technical success in order to create high quality software which lasts the test of time. We need organizational success because otherwise we cannot sell software no matter how good it is. We also need personal success because we are humans and we need to have a sense of accomplishment beside that obtained by writing a good piece of software.
The entire interview is 30 minutes long.