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Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP Review by Erik Sargent
Understanding RUP as Agile
If you consider yourself an agile developer, but you keep getting heat from management about more discipline, this is a great book to get some perspective with. Taking individual practices from RUP and applying them "just enough" in key places can build trust and improve communication inside development and with external customers and other political stakeholders.
The authors do a great job too of explaining the range of formality available to a team and what the factors are that should push you towards greater formality - such as distributed teams, lack of trust, stakeholders external to the team, etc.
And if you are tied to more formal methods, the book can help you understand when it might be safe to try a little less formality.
There is no agile bashing in the book. It's clear they understand the ideas behind the movement. They explicitly recognize the discipline required by agile developers and point out anti-patterns for project teams that mostly align with what agile teams know to be true.
Yes, it is weird to have the RUP guys talking about agile, but agile teams work best when they are focused on continuous improvement, and there is a lot to learn here for any development team.