Damon Poole wrote:This book contains everything you need to get Agile adopted on your project. It is written with the expectation that you are either skeptical of Agile development or that you will need to counter skepticism as you advocate the use of Agile.

The book starts with a description of Agile development and briefly describes how Agile works. This is followed by an examination of the problems with traditional development and shows how the root causes of these problems can also cause resistance to Agile adoption. Awareness of these problems will simplify your adoption of Agile.

Software development involves a large portion of work on tasks which have not been done before using technology that has not been used before. Add in the fact that creating something that satisfies users is more of an art than a science and you have lots of unpredictability. This is often cited as an unsolvable problem that is the major contributor to project failure. However, there are many ways to increase predictability. Some come from process changes such as separating tasks into those that are predictable and those that are not, and others come from examining how other professions succeed in the face of unpredictability and translating those techniques back to software development.