To many, Agility means implementing an off­the­shelf process such as Scrum or XP. However, these deal with idealised circumstances and are often combined with other processes and management techniques in order to meet real-world challenges.

Adapt regards these "extras" as part of a wider, more complete solution; they are not unfortunate necessities but opportunities for improvement. The book provides a framework for applying Agile processes (whether off­the­shelf or of your own design) to your organisation. It draws upon experience from some of the largest Agile projects in the world to help you walk the line between the Agile ideal and the realities of software engineering.

Adapt answers the key questions for the five elements that comprise an Agile process and the goal of incremental delivery:

• Getting the most from the iterative process requires us to optimise it to fit into individual organisations, yet how do we know what to change without losing the benefits that the process tries to deliver?
• Incremental delivery requires a new approach to analysis and prioritisation. How do we ensure that project resolves initial uncertainty in good time while delivering to the customer's most important needs and simultaneously responding to continual feedback?
• If responding to feedback results in a continually changing product then how do we make the idea of frequently modifying code anything other than a daunting prospect? The traditional mantra of “change is death” has to be overcome and resolved.
• Agile requires continual interaction between developers and the customer yet many projects put up barriers to communication, often without the people involved realising. How can we break down these barriers to allow the smooth flow of information that Agile needs?
• Planning and tracking provides a particular challenge to Agile projects: how do you commit to a plan and then report against it in an environment that continually changes? If you expect your scope to change significantly during a project, what does your team actually commit to at the beginning?

For each of these elements Adapt lays out goals for your project and the milestones by which you can measure success. In particular, the book provides new insight into the challenges of scaling Agile, including an industry­tested approach to planning and tracking that fits everything from simple developments to multi­million pound projects.