"Hundreds of organizations around the world have already benefited from Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). Disciplined Agile (DA) is the only comprehensive tool kit available for guidance on building high-performance agile teams and optimizing your way of working (WoW). As a hybrid of all the leading agile and lean approaches, it provides hundreds of strategies to help you make better decisions within your agile teams, balancing self-organization with the realities and constraints of your unique enterprise context. The highlights of this handbook include: #1. As the official source of knowledge on DAD, it includes greatly improved and enhanced strategies with a revised set of goal diagrams based upon learnings from applying DAD in the field. #2 It is an essential handbook to help coaches and teams make better decisions in their daily work, providing a wealth of ideas for experimenting with agile and lean techniques while providing specific guidance and trade-offs for those "it depends" questions. #3 It makes a perfect study guide for Disciplined Agile certification. Why "fail fast" (as our industry likes to recommend) when you can learn quickly on your journey to high performance? With this handbook, you can make better decisions based upon proven, context-based strategies, leading to earlier success and better outcomes"--

"Hundreds of organizations around the world have already benefited from Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). Disciplined Agile (DA) is the only comprehensive tool kit available for guidance on building high-performance agile teams and optimizing your way of working (WoW). As a hybrid of all the leading agile and lean approaches, it provides hundreds of strategies to help you make better decisions within your agile teams, balancing self-organization with the realities and constraints of your unique enterprise context. The highlights of this handbook include: #1. As the official source of knowledge on DAD, it includes greatly improved and enhanced strategies with a revised set of goal diagrams based upon learnings from applying DAD in the field. #2 It is an essential handbook to help coaches and teams make better decisions in their daily work, providing a wealth of ideas for experimenting with agile and lean techniques while providing specific guidance and trade-offs for those "it depends" questions. #3 It makes a perfect study guide for Disciplined Agile certification. Why "fail fast" (as our industry likes to recommend) when you can learn quickly on your journey to high performance? With this handbook, you can make better decisions based upon proven, context-based strategies, leading to earlier success and better outcomes"--

There are literally hundreds of books that have been written on agile and lean. So why one more? Most books focus on just a subset of what is required to delivery end-to-end solutions in an agile manner. Developing a coherent approach to the complete picture by piecing together these practices is difficult, especially when the advice in many of these books is conflicting and not well researched, often based on just a few successful applications in a specific context.Disciplined Agile Delivery is the only toolkit available that combines the most effective practices across lean and agile methods into one comprehensive context-driven approach that you can use to optimize your way of working (WoW).This handbook is an indispensable guide for agile coaches and practitioners for understanding what options are effective in certain situations and not as effective in others. This advice is based on proven experience from hundreds of organizations facing similar situations to yours.There are many ways that a team can adopt to help them improve their WoW, strategies that are captured by the Evolve WoW process goal described in Chapter 24 of this book. Many people recommend an experimental approach to improvement, and we've found guided experiments to be even more effective. The basic idea with the PDSA/PDCA/OODA continuous improvement loop strategy is that you improve your WoW as a series of small changes, a strategy the lean community calls kaizen, which is Japanese for improvement. The first step is to identify a potential improvement, such as a new practice or strategy, that you want to experiment with to see how well it works for you in the context of your situation. The value of DA is that it can guide you through this identification step by helping you to identify a new practice/strategy that is likely to address the challenge you're hoping to address. By doing so you increase your chance of identifying a potential improvement that works for you, thereby speeding up your efforts to improve your WoW - we call this guided continuous improvement.There are several ways that this book provides the guidance your team requires to choose and evolve your WoW. First, it describes size lifecycles to choose from, providing lightweight guidance for when and when not to choose each one. These lifecycles are: A Scrum-based Agile project lifecycle, a Kanban-based Lean project lifecycle, an Agile Continuous Delivery lifecycle, a Lean Continuous Delivery lifecycle, a Program (team of teams) lifecycle, and a Lean Startup-based Exploratory lifecycle. Second, it provides outcome-based process goals from which guide you through choosing from the hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of techniques available to your team. Third, it provides guidance to improve how you reflect and improve upon your WoW, increasing the chance that you'll choose techniques to experiment that are likely to work in the context that you face, thereby increasing the rate at which your team improves. Most importantly, we show how teams can have unique WoWs yet still be governed in a consistent and effective manner by your organization's leadership. In short, guided continuous improvement enables your team to make better process decisions which then lead to better outcomes.Choose Your WoW! is organized into six sections:1.Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) in a Nutshell. 2.Successfully Initiating Your Team. 3.Producing Business Value. 4.Releasing Into Production.5.Sustaining and Enhancing Your Team. 6.Parting Thoughts and Back MatterFinally, this book is the study guide for Disciplined Agile CDA and CDAP certifications. Certs based on earned knowledge and experience: skilled people produce better results.

Master IBM’s Breakthrough DAD Process Framework for Succeeding with Agile in Large, Complex, Mission-Critical IT Projects It is widely recognized that moving from traditional to agile approaches to build software solutions is a critical source of competitive advantage. Mainstream agile approaches that are indeed suitable for small projects require significant tailoring for larger, complex enterprise projects. In Disciplined Agile Delivery, Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce IBM’s breakthrough Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, which describes how to do this tailoring. DAD applies a more disciplined approach to agile development by acknowledging and dealing with the realities and complexities of a portfolio of interdependent program initiatives. Ambler and Lines show how to extend Scrum with supplementary agile and lean strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Unified Process (UP), and other proven methods to provide a hybrid approach that is adaptable to your organization’s unique needs. They candidly describe what practices work best, why they work, what the trade-offs are, and when to consider alternatives, all within the context of your situation. Disciplined Agile Delivery addresses agile practices across the entire lifecycle, from requirements, architecture, and development to delivery and governance. The authors show how these best-practice techniques fit together in an end-to-end process for successfully delivering large, complex systems--from project initiation through delivery. Coverage includes Scaling agile for mission-critical enterprise endeavors Avoiding mistakes that drive poorly run agile projects to chaos Effectively initiating an agile project Transitioning as an individual to agile Incrementally building consumable solutions Deploying agile solutions into complex production environments Leveraging DevOps, architecture, and other enterprise disciplines Adapting your governance strategy for agile projects Based on facts, research, and extensive experience, this book will be an indispensable resource for every enterprise software leader and practitioner--whether they’re seeking to optimize their existing agile/Scrum process or improve the agility of an iterative process.

Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery provides a quick overview of how agile software development works from beginning-to-end. It describes the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework and then works through a case study describing a typical agile team's experiences adopting a disciplined agile approach. The book describes how the team develops the first release of a mission-critical application while working in a legacy enterprise environment. It describes their experiences from beginning-to-end, starting with their initial team initiation efforts through construction and finally to deploying the solution into production. It also describes how the team stays together for future releases, overviewing their process improvement efforts from their Scrum-based beginnings through to a lean continuous delivery approach that fits in with their organization's evolving DevOps strategy.The DAD framework is a hybrid of existing methods such as Scrum, Kanban, Agile Modeling, SAFe, Extreme Programming, Agile Data, Unified Process and many others. DAD provides the flexibility to use various approaches and plugs the gaps not addressed by mainstream agile methods. In a nutshell, DAD is "pragmatic agile." DAD describes proven strategies to adapt and scale your agile initiatives to suit the unique realities of your enterprise without having to figure it all out by yourself.Here's an overview of what each chapter covers:* Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter provides a quick overview of the book and a brief history of Disciplined Agile.* Chapter 2: Reality over Rhetoric. This chapter explores several common myths about DAD and more importantly disproves them.* Chapter 3: Disciplined Agile Delivery in a Nutshell. This chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the DAD framework. * Chapter 4: Introduction to the Case Study. This chapter introduces us to the team, describes the market opportunity that they hope to address, and describes the environment in which they're working.* Chapter 5: Inception. The team's initiation effort includes initial requirements modeling and planning with their stakeholders in a streamlined manner, initial architecture modeling, setting up their physical work environment, setting up the start of their tooling infrastructure, initial risk identification, and finally securing stakeholder support and funding for the rest of the first release.* Chapters 6 through 10: Construction. These chapters each describe a single Construction iteration, sharing the team's experiences during each of those two-week timeboxes. * Chapter 11: Transition. The two-week transition phase focuses on final testing and fixing, training the support/help-desk staff, finishing a few short end-user "how to" videos, and deploying the solution into production.* Chapter 12: Future Releases. This chapter overviews the team's improvement efforts over the next few releases, describing how they evolve from the agile Scrum-based lifecycle to a leaner approach and eventually to continuous delivery.* Chapter 13: Closing Thoughts. This chapter overviews the disciplined agile resources that are available to you.* Appendix: The Disciplined Agile IT Department. This short appendix overviews our ongoing work on the Disciplined Agile framework to address the full scope of an IT department. At 102 pages, you should find this book to be a quick, informative read.

For decades, Sharon Steuer and her international WOW! team have been showcasing the world’s best artists and designers working in Illustrator. In this expanded edition of the best-selling and award-winning Illustrator WOW! Book, you’ll find hundreds of tips, tricks, and techniques derived from actual projects from top Illustrator artists. You’ll learn to use new features, discover exciting ways to create complex effects, and find fresh ways to use venerable old tools and¿speed up your workflow. This edition includes coverage of the 2014 release and is loaded with and lessons with stunning new artwork that feature: Painting and generating objects with raster brushes Harnessing Live Corners, Live Rectangles, and new ways to reshape paths Manipulating live type characters with the Touch Type tool Creating airbrush and neon effects with gradients on strokes Building complex styles with multiple lines, fills, and effects Composing complex repeating patterns Auto-generating corners for pattern brushes Incorporating transparency into mesh and gradients Building and modifying scenes in perspective and 3D Transforming raster art to Illustrator vectors Preparing artwork for animation and the web Integrating Illustrator with Photoshop and other apps Creating photorealism in Illustrator WOW! ONLINE Register the book at peachpit.com/register to access artwork to pick apart and special PDFs from artists to you. Keep up with tips on the latest Illustrator features at WOWartist.com.

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