At work, we’ve decided we need a little bit more process, so I’m going to attempt to lead our small group of programmers in that direction. We have a vague feeling that since there aren’t many of us, we need to keep things as lightweight and practical as possible, and that something “agile” would probably be the best direction. Beyond having read a bit here and there, I’ve never had any direct contact with “agile” in the wild. We don’t want a rigid methodology so much as a set of guidelines and, perhaps, tools that help us track time and projects. It all needs to impose very low overhead – because an imperfect tool that gets used is far better than something very fancy that gets ignored when people get in a rush.

So… advice? I’m willing to get a book or two, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many of them are quite inflated with respect to their core concepts which could likely be summed up in a few pages. Anyone have any practical guides for small shops that want to try and reduce the chaos level just a bit?