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“If your desire is to effect change or have more influence on a software team, you could either stumble around in the dark for a few years, experimenting with different techniques, or you could buy, read, and apply the techniques in this book. This choice, of course, is up to you.”–Matthew Heusser “Jim Brosseau’s understanding of the true dynamics of the IT workplace shows through in Software Teamwork. For those on the IT solution delivery front lines, and for those who manage them, his insights and wisdom will lead to not only better projects, but a better work life as well.”–Bruce A. Stewart, Chief Executive Officer, Accendor Research, Inc. Optimizing the Human Side of Software Development: Real Solutions Based on Real Data and Experience Software Teamwork is a compelling, innovative, intensely practical guide to improving the human dynamics that are crucial to building great software. Drawing on years of work with a wide range of teams, Jim Brosseau shows how to drive powerful improvements through small, focused changes that deliver results. These changes are designed to work for the whole team and respect existing organizational culture. Better yet, Brosseau identifies solutions you can start implementing right now, as an individual, without waiting for executive buy-in. Whatever your methodology, technology, or organization, Software Teamwork demonstrates how to apply solutions to realistic development challenges involving complex sets of stakeholders. Along the way, Brosseau shares important new insights into the attitudes, motives, and personal relationships that project management software just can’t track. Software Teamwork is a revelation–and an invaluable working resource for every project team member, leader, and stakeholder. Preface xv Acknowledgments xxi About the Author xxiii Part I: The Problem Space Chapter 1: Why Are We So Challenged? 3 Chapter 2: Do the Right Thing 23 Part II: Individuals Chapter 3: The Right Stuff 39 Chapter 4: A Quality Focus 53 Chapter 5: Facing Challenges 65 Chapter 6: Proactive Effectiveness 81 Chapter 7: Sustainability 95 Part III: Groups Chapter 8: Communication 109 Chapter 9: Motives and Expectations 125 Chapter 10: Playing Well Together 143 Part IV: Teams Chapter 11: Alignment 161 Chapter 12: Organization 177 Chapter 13: Coordination 199 Chapter 14: Guidance 217 Part V: Stakeholders Chapter 15: Customers 235 Chapter 16: Setting Goals 243 Chapter 17: Specification 259 Chapter 18: Prioritization 273 Chapter 19: Change 283 Chapter 20: Progress 295 Part VI: Putting It All Together Chapter 21: Pick Your Battles 311 Chapter 22: Flexibility and Rigor 323 Chapter 23: Progress Revisited 335 Chapter 24: Change Revisited 345 Chapter 25: Constant Vigilance 361 Part VII: Appendix Appendix: Core Tools 375 Index 387
Organizations invest immense amounts of time, resources, and attention in their software projects. But all too often, when it's time to transfer the finished project to new "owners," they settle for the most superficial classroom training, documentation, and code walkthroughs. These conventional approaches to knowledge transfer often fail, dramatically reducing the value of new systems in production. You can do much better - and Software Ownership Transfer will show you how. This is the first practical, hands-on guide to knowledge transfer in today's agile environments. Using a realistic, large-scale case study, ThoughtWorks expert Vinod Sankaranarayanan shows how to elevate knowledge transfer from "necessary evil" to an activity full of agility and innovation, and bring together multiple organizations and cultures to make ownership transfer work. Sankaranarayanan explains why mere documentation of error reports and processes isn't enough, and shows how to successfully craft a knowledge transfer program that's more substantive and effective. Along the way, he offers guidance on overcoming the commercial compromises and personal tensions often associated with transferring systems to new ownership; and on transforming mere "knowledge transfer" into something much better: "taking ownership."
In the course of their 20+-year engineering careers, authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman have picked up a treasure trove of wisdom and anecdotes about how successful teams work together. Their conclusion? Even among people who have spent decades learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven’t really focused on the human component. Learning to collaborate is just as important to success. If you invest in the "soft skills" of your job, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. The authors share their insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users of your software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.
More and more managerial challenges require leaders to be accountable-to take initiative without having full authority for the process or the outcomes. Accountability goes beyond responsibility. Whereas responsibility is generally delegated by the boss, the organization, or by virtue of position, accountability is having an intrinsic sense of ownership of the task and the willingness to face the consequences that come with success or failure. Through this guidebook you will learn how your organization and its leaders can create a culture that fosters accountability by focusing on five areas: support, freedom, information, resources, and goal and role clarity.
Finalist for the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Best business book of the week from Inc.com The author of Power, Stanford business school professor, and a leading management thinker offers a hard-hitting dissection of the leadership industry and ways to make workplaces and careers work better. The leadership enterprise is enormous, with billions of dollars, thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of blogs and talks focused on improving leaders. But what we see worldwide is employee disengagement, high levels of leader turnover and career derailment, and failed leadership development efforts. In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer shines a bright light on the leadership industry, showing why it’s failing and how it might be remade. He sets the record straight on the oft-made prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest, tell the truth, build trust, and take care of others. By calling BS on so many of the stories and myths of leadership, he gives people a more scientific look at the evidence and better information to guide their careers. Rooted in social science, and will practical examples and advice for improving management, Leadership BS encourages readers to accept the truth and then use facts to change themselves and the world for the better.
Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.
Successfully Implement High-Value Configuration Management Processes in Any Development Environment As IT systems have grown increasingly complex and mission-critical, effective configuration management (CM) has become critical to an organization’s success. Using CM best practices, IT professionals can systematically manage change, avoiding unexpected problems introduced by changes to hardware, software, or networks. Now, today’s best CM practices have been gathered in one indispensable resource showing you how to implement them throughout any agile or traditional development organization. Configuration Management Best Practices is practical, easy to understand and apply, and fully reflects the day-to-day realities faced by practitioners. Bob Aiello and Leslie Sachs thoroughly address all six “pillars” of CM: source code management, build engineering, environment configuration, change control, release engineering, and deployment. They demonstrate how to implement CM in ways that support software and systems development, meet compliance rules such as SOX and SAS-70, anticipate emerging standards such as IEEE/ISO 12207, and integrate with modern frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, and CMMI. Coverage includes Using CM to meet business objectives, contractual requirements, and compliance rules Enhancing quality and productivity through lean processes and “just-in-time” process improvement Getting off to a good start in organizations without effective CM Implementing a Core CM Best Practices Framework that supports the entire development lifecycle Mastering the “people” side of CM: rightsizing processes, overcoming resistance, and understanding workplace psychology Architecting applications to take full advantage of CM best practices Establishing effective IT controls and compliance Managing tradeoffs and costs and avoiding expensive pitfalls Configuration Management Best Practices is the essential resource for everyone concerned with CM: from CTOs and CIOs to development, QA, and project managers and software engineers to analysts, testers, and compliance professionals.
Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage. You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources—and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results. Coverage includes Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects Reducing resistance to process improvements Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation Mitigating project risks more effectively—especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress
Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award! Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours— sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the “deployment pipeline,” an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the “ecosystem” needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes • Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software • Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels • Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations • Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams • Implementing an effective configuration management strategy • Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation • Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements • Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases • Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies • Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you’re a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever—so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.