Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

This commentary was initially included in a lengthy book review post about the book “Tale of Two Systems”.  Given I will be referring to these two documents on an ongoing basis, I have shifted the commentary to this separate page.

In the Tale of Two Systems, this is called “The Concept Document”.

This, along with the “Statement of Work” are the two key documents referenced in the book.   This model of only two key documents is certainly something worthwhile for us to follow…

Personally speaking (and knowing how language is loaded with semantics) I would prefer we even use the name “What and Why Document” to describe this one.

Paraphrasing the book, this is essentially the marketing document (i.e. the business case to which internal and external partners sign up).  It contains such things as:
1)  Financial projections
2)  Who we think the users are
3)  Their value proposition
4)  How much we think they will be willing to pay
5)  How much we think it will cost us to develop
6)  The risks and threats we see.

In other words:

WHAT and WHY

I know that someone recommended I read this one – I apologise for forgetting who it was!  Was it you, Justin?

I read this book as it claimed to answer some questions I had been pondering along the lines of “what’s this AGILE thing all about?” .

Shane’s review helped, but I still had loads more questions – as a result of which we loaded up our Amazon cart with quite a few books on the topic, of which this is the first I have reviewed.

1)  Binary Review

This book is written as a fictional tale of two separate software development projects within the same large company – one using “Lean and Agile” Software Development, and one using a more traditional (e.g. waterfall) approach.

The Book	What we thought
“A Tale of Two Systems”by Michael K Levine	. Useful (and very timely for us)!

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As a novel, this book certainly does NOT qualify as “Un-Put-Down-Able”.

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