Agile Book Writing

Janet and I turned in our "final" manuscript (still have copy editing, proofreading etc to go) last night. The book is available for preorder on Amazon. on Amazon - how do they know how many pages it will be???

One cool thing (at least, in our opinion) is that we used agile practices to write the book. A year ago, we got together and mind mapped the whole book. Janet came up with a release plan, and we started in on it. We had two-week iterations. At the start of each iteration, we mind mapped two chapters, then started writing. We used an ftp site to keep the latest version of each chapter, and to pass chapters back and forth. (This was important, because otherwise it would've been easy to lose track of the latest version, or 'walk on' each others' changes). We each had a folder - 'Awaiting Janet Review', 'Awaiting Lisa Review'.

At the end of each iteration, we 'released' two chapters - that is, we posted them on our book site for review by our volunteer reviewers. We used a spreadsheet on Google Docs to help our 'source code control', checking chapters in and out. We also kept a 'to do' list and notes for the bibliography on Google Docs.

We got continual feedback throughout this development cycle. We were able to visually share ideas with our mind maps (using MindJet MindManager software). We kept in constant touch with IM, and met a couple of times in person. We build a couple extra weeks into the schedule during the holidays, and kept working at a sustainable pace (it's really hard to write a book when you have a full time job!)

By March, we had all the draft chapters posted and informally reviewed. Janet put together a new release schedule to revise all the chapters in time to send our draft manuscript to the publisher June 1. We did a major refactoring of the book, moving sections around and completely reorganizing the automation section. We made our deadline, although I confess we were more 'agile' about our release plan, we worked on the chapters in a different order than planned.

We waited a few weeks for our official reviewers to give us their feedback, then we did the last, most punishing stretch, making our final revisions. We again did a fairly major refactoring, eliminating two chapters and folding the information in them into different chapters where it made more sense.

If we took even more time, we're sure we could make the book even better. In fact, we've gotten some ideas here at the end that we could have used. However, people have been clamoring for this book (which is gratifying) since we started writing it. Every time we go to present at a conference or help a team, people want to know when it will be out, and complain when we say "January 2009". We feel (and so does our publisher) that it's better to get some really useful information out earlier, rather than to keep polishing the book and get a more perfect book out later. I don't know about you, but that's how my agile development team works, too.

It's been really interesting to see how we were able to apply agile values, principles and practices to writing a book, as well as to developing software. Wonder what else could be done better with agile!