The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development


Donald G. Reinertsen - 2009
    He explains why invisible and unmanaged queues are the underlying root cause of poor product development performance. He shows why these queues form and how they undermine the speed, quality, and efficiency in product development.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master


Andy Hunt - 1999
    It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how toFight software rot; Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge; Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code; Avoid programming by coincidence; Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions; Capture real requirements; Test ruthlessly and effectively; Delight your users; Build teams of pragmatic programmers; and Make your developments more precise with automation. Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with entertaining anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best practices and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you're a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you'll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You'll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career. You'll become a Pragmatic Programmer.

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.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management


Will Larson - 2019
    Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies. Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle orients around the particular challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams to technical debt to succession planning--and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager


Michael Lopp - 2007
    Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account.Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you.

Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It


Andy Oram - 2010
    But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community. Their insights may surprise you.Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others?Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster?Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software?Do design patterns actually make better software?What effect does personality have on pair programming?What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart?Contributors include:Jorge Aranda Tom Ball Victor R. Basili Andrew Begel Christian Bird Barry Boehm Marcelo Cataldo Steven Clarke Jason Cohen Robert DeLine Madeline Diep Hakan Erdogmus Michael Godfrey Mark Guzdial Jo E. Hannay Ahmed E. Hassan Israel Herraiz Kim Sebastian Herzig Cory Kapser Barbara Kitchenham Andrew Ko Lucas Layman Steve McConnell Tim Menzies Gail Murphy Nachi Nagappan Thomas J. Ostrand Dewayne Perry Marian Petre Lutz Prechelt Rahul Premraj Forrest Shull Beth Simon Diomidis Spinellis Neil Thomas Walter Tichy Burak Turhan Elaine J. Weyuker Michele A. Whitecraft Laurie Williams Wendy M. Williams Andreas Zeller Thomas Zimmermann

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great


Esther Derby - 2006
    The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as "post-mortems") are only helpful at the end of the project--too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.Now, Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project--not just at the end.With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.ContentsForwardPrefaceIntroduction1. Helping your team inspect and adapt2. A retrospective custom-fit for your team3. Leading retrospectives4. Activities to set the stage5. Activities to gather data6. Activities to gather insights7. Activities to decide what to do8. Activities to close the retrospective9. Releases and project retrospectives10. Make it soA1. Facilitation suppliesA2. Debriefing activitiesA3. Activities quick reference matrixA4. Resources for learning facilitation skillsA5. Bibliography

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow


Matthew Skelton - 2019
    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.

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers)


Michael T. Nygard - 2007
    Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations


Nicole Forsgren - 2018
    Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance—and what drives it—using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture


Martin Fowler - 2002
    Multi-tiered object-oriented platforms, such as Java and .NET, have become commonplace. These new tools and technologies are capable of building powerful applications, but they are not easily implemented. Common failures in enterprise applications often occur because their developers do not understand the architectural lessons that experienced object developers have learned. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is written in direct response to the stiff challenges that face enterprise application developers. The author, noted object-oriented designer Martin Fowler, noticed that despite changes in technology--from Smalltalk to CORBA to Java to .NET--the same basic design ideas can be adapted and applied to solve common problems. With the help of an expert group of contributors, Martin distills over forty recurring solutions into patterns. The result is an indispensable handbook of solutions that are applicable to any enterprise application platform. This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book's lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. Each pattern provides usage and implementation information, as well as detailed code examples in Java or C#. The entire book is also richly illustrated with UML diagrams to further explain the concepts. Armed with this book, you will have the knowledge necessary to make important architectural decisions about building an enterprise application and the proven patterns for use when building them. The topics covered include - Dividing an enterprise application into layers - The major approaches to organizing business logic - An in-depth treatment of mapping between objects and relational databases - Using Model-View-Controller to organize a Web presentation - Handling concurrency for data that spans multiple transactions - Designing distributed object interfaces

Team Geek: A Software Developer's Guide to Working Well with Others


Brian W. Fitzpatrick - 2012
    And in a perfect world, those who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done.In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. It's valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular video series, "Working with Poisonous People," has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.You'll learn how to deal with imperfect people--those irrational and unpredictable beings--in the course of your work. And you'll discover why playing well with others is at least as important as having great technical skills. By internalizing the techniques in this book, you'll get more software written, be more influential, be happier in your career.

Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation


Jez Humble - 2010
    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.

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering


Laurent Bossavit - 2012
    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.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code


Michael C. Feathers - 2004
    This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars, techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. The topics covered include: Understanding the mechanics of software change, adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance Getting legacy code into a test harness Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems Techniques that can be used with any language or platform, with examples in Java, C++, C, and C# Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented Handling applications that don't seem to have any structureThis book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.