Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash


Mary Poppendieck - 2006
    These principles have revolutionized manufacturing and have been adopted by the most innovative product companies including Toyota and 3M. In 2003 the Poppendieck's published Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit which showed how these same lean principles can be successfully applied to software development. Since that publication the authors have increased their understanding of Lean and Agile problems faced by large organizations and have emerged as leading advocates for bringing Lean production techniques to software development. While their first book provides an introduction, theoretical advice and a reference to Lean, this follow-up incorporates their gained knowledge and understanding of what works and goes steps further to provide hands-on guidance for implementing a Lean system. Using historical case studies from prominent companies such as Polaris, Lockheed and Fujistu the authors prove the overall value of Lean practices and shows how to effectively apply these methods to software production.

The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management


Tom DeMarco - 1997
    Rizzoli- Ex-General Markov- Abdul Jamid- The Sinister Minister Belok- The Numbers Man- QuickerStill- Morovia's First Programmer- Think Fast!- Planning for the Summer Games- The Guru of Conflict Resolution- Maestro Diyeniar- Interlude- Part and Whole- Standing on Ceremony- Endgame Begins- The Year's Hottest IPO- Passing Through Riga on the Way Home

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process


Kenneth S. Rubin - 2012
    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product


Jeff Patton - 2012
    With this practical book, you'll explore the often-misunderstood practice of user story mapping, and learn how it can help keep your team stay focused on users and their experience throughout the development process.You and your team will learn that user stories aren't a way to write better specifications, but a way to organize and have better conversations. This book will help you understand what kinds of conversations you should be having, when to have them, and what to keep track of when you do. Learn the key concepts used to create a great story map. Understand how user stories really work, and how to make good use of them in agile and lean projects. Examine the nuts and bolts of managing stories through the development cycle. Use strategies that help you continue to learn before and after the product's release to customers and usersUser Story Mapping is ideal for agile and lean software development team members, product managers and UX practitioners in commercial product companies, and business analysts and project managers in IT organizations—whether you're new to this approach or want to understand more about it.

Remote: Office Not Required


David Heinemeier Hansson - 2013
    Moms in particular will welcome this trend.  A full 60% wish they had a flexible work option. But companies see advantages too in the way remote work increases their talent pool, reduces turnover, lessens their real estate footprint, and improves the ability to conduct business across multiple time zones, to name just a few advantages.  In Remote, inconoclastic authors Fried and Hansson will convince readers that letting all or part of work teams function remotely is a great idea--and they're going to show precisely how a remote work setup can be accomplished.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results


Mike Rother - 2009
    Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute. This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain of Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers? Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting. With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work


Jason Fried - 2018
    Now, they build on their message with a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture—what they call "the calm company." Their approach directly attack the chaos, anxiety, and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and hampers billions of workers every day.Long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for modern professionals. But it should be a mark of stupidity, the authors argue. Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for large organizations—individuals, contractors, and solopreneurs are burning themselves out the same way. The answer to better productivity isn’t more hours—it’s less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress.It’s time to stop celebrating Crazy, and start celebrating Calm, Fried and Hansson assert.Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. "Calm" has been the cornerstone of their company’s culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn’t a book telling you what to do. It’s a book showing you what they’ve done—and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters


Ryan Singer - 2019
    "This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, you’re probably here because of some common challenges that all software companies have to face."

The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer


Jeffrey K. Liker - 2003
    Less inventory. The highest quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer. In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, product development, and process excellence. The result is an amazing business success story: steadily taking market share from price-cutting competitors, earning far more profit than any other automaker, and winning the praise of business leaders worldwide.The Toyota Way reveals the management principles behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability. Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a renowned authority on Toyota's Lean methods, explains how you can adopt these principles--known as the "Toyota Production System" or "Lean Production"--to improve the speed of your business processes, improve product and service quality, and cut costs, no matter what your industry.Drawing on his extensive research on Toyota, Dr. Liker shares his insights into the foundational principles at work in the Toyota culture. He explains how the Toyota Production System evolved as a new paradigm of manufacturing excellence, transforming businesses across industries. You'll learn how Toyota fosters employee involvement at all levels, discover the difference between traditional process improvement and Toyota's Lean improvement, and learn why companies often think they are Lean--but aren't.

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories


Gojko Adzic - 2014
    Above all, this book will help you achieve the promise of agile and iterative delivery: to ensure that the right stuff gets delivered through productive discussions between delivery team members and business stakeholders.

Measure What Matters


John E. Doerr - 2017
     With a foreword by Larry Page, and contributions from Bono and Bill Gates. Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business. In 1999, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr invested nearly $12 million in a startup that had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. Doerr introduced the founders to OKRs and with them at the foundation of their management, the startup grew from forty employees to more than 70,000 with a market cap exceeding $600 billion. The startup was Google. Since then Doerr has introduced OKRs to more than fifty companies, helping tech giants and charities exceed all expectations. In the OKR model objectives define what we seek to achieve and key results are how those top­ priority goals will be attained. OKRs focus effort, foster coordination and enhance workplace satisfaction. They surface an organization's most important work as everyone's goals from entry-level to CEO are transparent to the entire institution. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will show you how to collect timely, relevant data to track progress - to measure what matters. It will help any organization or team aim high, move fast, and excel.

Scrum Mastery: From Good To Great Servant-Leadership


Geoff Watts - 2013
    But being a great ScrumMaster, one who truly embodies the principles of servant-leadership and helps move a team to the high performance levels possible with Scrum, is much harder and much more elusive. In his over ten years of coaching numerous Scrum teams, the highly-respected and experienced Scrum coach Geoff Watts has identified patterns that separate a good ScrumMaster from a great one. In this book, he not only illustrates these patterns through stories of his own experiences and those of the many Scrum teams he has encountered but offers practical guidance for you on your own path to greatness.In this book you will learn:The skills and characteristics of great ScrumMastersHow to generate, maintain and increase engagement from the teamHow to increase the effectiveness of the Scrum meetings, such as retrospectives and daily scrums.How to foster a more creative and collaborative teamHow to increase the performance of the teamHow to know when you are a successful ScrumMaster\Scrum Mastery is for practicing ScrumMasters who want to develop themselves into a great servant-leader capable of taking their teams beyond simple process compliance.Comments on the bookMike Cohn, in his foreword for the book, said:"Most books rehash well-trod territory and I don’t finish them any wiser. I am positive I will be referring back to this book for many years" Roman Pichler, author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love said:"I am thoroughly impressed with how comprehensive and well-written the book is. It will be indispensable for many people"Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow, Rally Software:"Geoff brings us a personal and inspired peak into what truly moves us from good to great: great in how we serve; great in how we lead; great in how we create mastery in our teams and organizations; and, great in how we recognize the impediments to our own growth to greatness. Scrum mastery is a skill that can be honed and Geoff gives us rich tools to sharpen our craft."

NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating


Vasco Duarte - 2016
    I wrote it because I believe we can do better than the accepted "status quo" in the software industry. It took me years to learn what I needed to learn to come up with my version of the #NoEstimates approach. You can do it in weeks! The techniques and ideas described here will help you explore the #NoEstimates universe in a very practical and hands-on manner. You will walk through Carmen's story. Carmen is a senior, very experienced project manager who is now confronted with a very difficult project. One would say, an impossible project. Through the book, and with the help of Herman, Carmen discovers and slowly adopts #NoEstimates which helps her turn that project around. Just like I expect it will help with the project you are in right now. The book also includes many concrete approaches you can use to adopt #NoEstimates, or just adopt those practices on their own.

The Dream Team Nightmare


Portia Tung - 2012
    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?

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days


Jake Knapp - 2016
    And now there’s a sure-fire way to solve their problems and test solutions: the sprint.While working at Google, designer Jake Knapp created a unique problem-solving method that he coined a “design sprint”—a five-day process to help companies answer crucial questions. His ‘sprints’ were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. When he moved to Google Ventures, he joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky, both designers and partners there who worked on products like YouTube and Gmail. Together Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz have run over 100 sprints with their portfolio companies. They’ve seen firsthand how sprints can overcome challenges in all kinds of companies: healthcare, fitness, finance, retailers, and more.A practical guide to answering business questions, Sprint is a book for groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.