The Agile Codex: Re-inventing Agile Through the Science of Invention and Assembly

The Agile Codex shows you how to describe a software project as an acyclic dependency tree of sized work items, scoped to be operated on by one software engineer each and completed within a week. It provides Open Source tooling to help you visualize, sequence and assign these work items to account for risk and increase predictability in your delivery times. You’ll see the value of doing this as it applies to efficiently planning and adjusting software projects in the face of learning and change. Finally, the book covers the collaborative agile principles required to bring this skill set and practice to a software team.

Throughout the book you’ll be reminded that software engineering is not a rote task - it is primarily a skilled, creative act. As such, you’ll see that we need to account for the space needed toresearch, plan, create, and adjust. The Agile practices serving the codex deal with this intersection between the engineering problem of software delivery flow, and the human reality of how work is described, owned, executed, and transitioned from one state to another.

Everything an agile team does must serve the codex. The creation and the care and feeding of this structured tree of work sets the frame in which all other team actions take place and against which all successes or failures can be evaluated.