The Devil and Those Pesky Details

If you’ve flipped through the book, you may have noticed that the introduction section of the tips features a small woodcut of the devil himself, tempting you into bad and careless habits. They look like this:

“Go ahead, take that shortcut. It will save you time, really. No one will ever know, and you can be done with this task and move on quickly. That’s what it’s all about.”

Some of his taunts may seem absurd, like something out of Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoons and his archetypical “pointy-haired boss.” But remember Mr. Adams takes a lot of input from his loyal readers.

Some may seem more outlandish than others, but they are all legitimate lines of thought that your authors have heard, seen in practice, or secretly thought. These are the temptations we face, the costly shortcut we try anyway, in the vain hope of saving time on the project.

To counter those temptations, there’s another section at the end of each practice where we’ll give you your own guardian angel, dispensing key advice that we think you should follow:

Start with the hardest. Always tackle the most difficult problems first, and leave the simple one towards the end.

And since the real world is rarely that black-and-white, we’ve included sections that describe what a particular practice should feel like and tips on how to implement it successfully and keep it in balance. They look like this:

What It Feels Like

This section describes what a particular practice should feel like. If you aren’t experiencing it this way, you may need to revise how you’re following a particular practice.

Keeping Your Balance

• It’s quite possible to overdo or underdo a practice, and in these sections we’ll try to give you advice to keep a practice in balance, as well as general tips to help make it work for you.

After all, too much of a good thing, or a good thing misapplied, can become very dangerous (all too often we’ve seen a so-called agile project fail because the team didn’t keep a particular practice in balance). We want to make sure you get real benefits from these practices.

By following these practices and applying them effectively in the real world—with balance—you’ll begin to see a positive change on your projects and in your team.

You’ll be following the practices of an agile developer, and what’s more, you’ll understand the principles that drive them.