Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance.Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts.For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive:Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.Don't move on to your next project without consulting and using this readable, practical handbook. Each member of your team will be better prepared for the next deadline.

    To grow professionally, you also need soft skills and effective learning techniques. Honing those skills is what this book is all about. Authors Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye have cataloged dozens of behavior patterns to help you perfect essential aspects of your craft. Compiled from years of research, many interviews, and feedback from O'Reilly's online forum, these patterns address difficult situations that programmers, administrators, and DBAs face every day. And it's not just about financial success. Apprenticeship Patterns also approaches software development as a means to personal fulfillment. Discover how this book can help you make the best of both your life and your career. Solutions to some common obstacles that this book explores in-depth include:Burned out at work? "Nurture Your Passion" by finding a pet project to rediscover the joy of problem solving.Feeling overwhelmed by new information? Re-explore familiar territory by building something you've built before, then use "Retreat into Competence" to move forward again.Stuck in your learning? Seek a team of experienced and talented developers with whom you can "Be the Worst" for a while. "Brilliant stuff! Reading this book was like being in a time machine that pulled me back to those key learning moments in my career as a professional software developer and, instead of having to learn best practices the hard way, I had a guru sitting on my shoulder guiding me every step towards master craftsmanship. I'll certainly be recommending this book to clients. I wish I had this book 14 years ago!" -Russ Miles, CEO, OpenCredo

    Whether you agree or disagree with him, and you're likely to do both, the essays in this book will always give you something worth thinking about.Mike Cohn, author of Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using ScrumTobias Mayer’s signature move is to pick up a stone and throw it through our glass house, smashing our old paradigms and causing us, after some pain and turmoil, to say, “OK, my comfortable way doesn’t work anymore. Now what?”Lyssa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile TeamsTobias Mayer has a really interesting mind: wide, deep, imaginative, and quirky. I value the quirky most because it's unpredictable. But in hindsight his jumps reveal themselves as the result of intelligence and rigor. What's more, he gets those jumps gracefully down on paper so that we can all participate.Lee Devin, author of Artrful Making and The Soul of DesignTobias Mayer is known in the agile community as a brilliant and evangelical orator, an innovative trainer and an extraordinary trouble maker. You could call him the Hunter S. Thompson of the software arena, and no one who knows him would laugh. This book is a collection of essays drawn from his writing over the past seven years on the blogs Agile Thinking and Agile Anarchy, missives from the front lines of agile practice that represent the next generation of thinking on conventional agile topics like self-organization, technical debt and estimation–and utterly original writing on new topics like organizational anarchy, corporate oppression, the effect of testosterone on business practices, and artisanal product development.Moving beyond the mere how-to, this is a book to excite the emotions and the intellect in those of us who have chosen the path of scrum to guide us in our work lives. Not since Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters has the discussion of software development been elevated to this level of world-view-changing discourse. In Tobias Mayer, technology has an exciting new voice to lead us into the brave new world of agile practice.

    I'm going to share that mindset with you — along with hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits — so you can shortcut those years.Introducing The Effective Engineer — the only book designed specifically for today's software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of techniques to accelerate your career.For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question:How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?I interviewed and collected stories from engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at today's top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.These leaders shared stories about the most valuable insights they've learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make.This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them:- What engineering qualities correlate with future success?- What have you done that has paid off the highest returns?- What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else?- What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year?- What advice do you give to new engineers on your team? Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes.You'll get to hear stories like:- How did Instagram's team of 5 engineers build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired?- How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day?- How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure?- How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch?- How did Facebook's small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers?- How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year? What's more, I've distilled their stories into actionable habits and lessons that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful.The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.And I'll teach them to you. With The Effective Engineer, I'll teach you a unifying framework called leverage — the value produced per unit of time invested — that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results.Here's a sneak peek at some of the lessons you'll learn. You'll learn how to:- Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact.- Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on your projects.- Spend less time maintaining and fixing software and more time building and shipping new features.- Produce more accurate software estimates.- Validate your ideas cheaply to reduce wasted work.- Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks.- Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance speed and quality.- Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed.

    McCarthy is a software industry veteran and the director of the Microsoft Visual C++ development group.

    Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

    Cracking the PM Interview is a comprehensive book about landing a product management role in a startup or bigger tech company. Learn how the ambiguously-named "PM" (product manager / program manager) role varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great PM resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the interview: estimation questions, behavioral questions, case questions, product questions, technical questions, and the super important "pitch."

    Now, pioneering ThoughtWorks software engineering expert Sriram Narayan shows how to do just that. Drawing on 15+ years working with leaders in telecommunications, finance, energy, retail, and beyond, he introduces a comprehensive agile approach to "Business-IT Effectiveness" that is as practical as it is valuable. Narayan demonstrates how to integrate agility throughout sales, marketing, product development, engineering, and operations, helping each function deliver more value individually and through its linkages with the rest of the business. Addressing people, process, and technology, he guides you in improving both the dynamic and static aspects of organization design, addressing team structure, accountability structures, organizational norms and culture, knowledge management, and more. Using real examples, Narayan helps you evaluate and improve organization designs to enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose. You'll learn how to eliminate the specific organizational silos that cause the most problems... improve communication in organizations that claim to be (but aren't really) non-hierarchical... optimize the way you build teams, design office space, and even choose tools. Simply put, Agile IT Organization Design will help you improve improving the performance of any software organization by propagating agile wherever it makes sense and offers value.

    You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

    In this book, you'll learn how to become an entrepreneur, driving your career in the direction of your choosing. You'll learn how to build your software development career step by step, following the same path that you would follow if you were building, marketing, and selling a product. After all, your skills themselves are a product. The choices you make about which technologies to focus on and which business domains to master have at least as much impact on your success as your technical knowledge itself--don't let those choices be accidental. We'll walk through all aspects of the decision-making process, so you can ensure that you're investing your time and energy in the right areas. You'll develop a structured plan for keeping your mind engaged and your skills fresh. You'll learn how to assess your skills in terms of where they fit on the value chain, driving you away from commodity skills and toward those that are in high demand. Through a mix of high-level, thought-provoking essays and tactical "Act on It" sections, you will come away with concrete plans you can put into action immediately. You'll also get a chance to read the perspectives of several highly successful members of our industry from a variety of career paths. As with any product or service, if nobody knows what you're selling, nobody will buy. We'll walk through the often-neglected world of marketing, and you'll create a plan to market yourself both inside your company and to the industry in general. Above all, you'll see how you can set the direction of your career, leading to a more fulfilling and remarkable professional life.

    As the words "at work" suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day–to–day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: http://www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 16 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:- Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow- Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang- Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google- Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger- Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!- L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1- Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation - Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal - Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer- Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler- Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX- Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI- Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress- Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX- Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hackerWhat you’ll learn:How the best programmers in the world do their jobWho is this book for?Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.

    We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

    You've just been introduced to your new team as their Agile Coach. The team calls themselves The Dream Team. You are responsible for coming up with a plan to get the team back on track to achieve their project goals.Shortly after the initial product launch, The Dream Team was set a challenge by the Management Team to try out an alternative way of working called Agile. Eighteen months on and the team is working anything but like a dream. In fact, life's become a bit of a nightmare. Morale is low. Productivity has ground to a halt. Quality has become a taboo subject.Management believes the project has reached an impasse. They demand results and are prepared to outsource the remainder of the project. You have 5 days to figure out how to help the team move forward.Your fate and that of your team is entirely in your hands. What choices will you make? Choose badly and you’ll come to a sticky end. Choose wisely and you and your team stand a chance of living happily ever after. What will you choose to do?

    The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.

    Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process. Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.) Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book. Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com