Rating: 
Summary: A good book with GREAT insight into the Agile methodologists
Review: This book is a good overview of the Agile movement, it's goals and aims, and provides a passable description of several of the methods that have now been labeled as "Agile" as opposed to the lumbering, dinosaur-like methods we have previously used (like the Rational Unified Process and its ancestors).But that's not why you should buy this book. The best thing about the book are the personal interviews with several of the members of the Agile alliance like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler and Alistair Cockburn. The interviews give you special insight into their personalities that reading their own work won't give you, and helps you place their work in context. The book is light and very readable (rare for a book on software methodology) and you given its structure you can even put it down for a few days and then come back without losing the thread of what is being discussed. Overall, it's a good "endcap" addition to any software developer's bookshelf right after the books on XP, Crystal and SCRUM.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is about "The Agile Movement", if there is such a word.
This books attempts to convey the rationale and "night thoughts" of veterans who have been the route of traditional methodologies and UML and the hard lessons learned.
It is an interesting and eye-opening book along the line of "The Mythical Man Month" that every software architects, program managers and students of software engineering should read. It does holds its concerns well. An analogy from the art world would be fit here:
It is an "Impressionist" software practices resurgent in responding to traditional "Renaissance" software practices in responding to market forces and expectation and to "get the job done", avoiding over-engineered and over modelled process. Whether Agile movement will be the last say in software process in the next decade is hard to say.
One big problem with software is that there are lack of accountability that other engineering discipline have and does not seem to fit the shoe as well other disciplines.(civil,electrical,etc). No one got drag to court if a software fails miserably. Compare that to a bridge or house collapsing.
So the ultimate question is "What is Software Engineering and does it makes sense?".
I think by reading this book will provoke you into thinking.
Rating:
Summary: Double WOW!!
Review: To me, as a developer, Bob Martin's "Agile Software Development" deserved the first WOW! As a manager, Jim Highsmith's "Agile Software Development Ecosystems" merited that WOW again.
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