After reading the book The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries I am stunned. I cannot believe the simplicity in which the author describes the act of developing a software product. Apparently, Ron Jeffries figured out the essence of software development: Keep it simple, make it valuable, build it piece by piece.
The book has only 100 pages with many pictures and uses blank space liberally. Even better, after reading half the book you covered the entire model. The second part is an FAQ and some parts might be skipped. This makes it a quick read.
A question not answered by this book is how to turn product visions into features. This is particularly challenging for sets of related features and long-term objectives. To be fair, this question is not answered by the agile development literature I’m familiar with, in general. I’ll cover one way to derive features from visions in an upcoming series of blog articles. [Update: as explained in Feature teams revisited: failure modes of feature teams feature teams are no silver bullet.]
The simplicity of the approach has changed my view and I find the clarity of thought inspiring. For these reasons I rate the book with 5 out of 5 stars. A highly recommended read. Enjoy!