One of the things about The Art of Agile Development that I'm most proud of is our continuous acknowledgement that one size doesn't fit all. We were writing a cookbook, after all, with specific instructions and guidance. We could have easily pretended that our advice was The One Right Way to practice Agile.

I'm glad we didn't fall to that temptation. It's not true, of course; there are many good ways to practice Agile. (Sadly, there are an infinite number of bad ways to practice Agile, and they're easier to find than good ways.) So we had to do what authors have always had to do: choose between being narrow and deep, or broad and shallow.

Obviously, we chose "narrow and deep." This week's excerpt, Is XP Right For Us?, was our attempt to have our cake and eat it too. We couldn't go broad, but we could at least be clear about what we were covering and what we weren't. Doing so gave us the opportunity to discuss the tradeoffs involved, too. I'm very happy with the result.

Next Week

The Thinking chapter is completely online, as I've mentioned, so next week's excerpt will be from the Collaborating chapter. We have four practices left to put online from that chapter. Which one would you like next week?

• Stand-Up Meetings
• Coding Standards
• Iteration Demo
• Reporting

I'll look for your vote in the comments.