Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects


Diana Larsen - 2011
    As the first act of flight, a rocket launch requires an entire set of systems to lift the vehicle into orbit-not just the vehicle itself, but all the systems needed for smoothly moving off the ground into space. Likewise, your project needs its entire set of supporting systems in place to begin a successful journey to delivery. Whatever you call it (project kickoff, bootcamp, inception, or jump start), liftoff gives your team its trajectory, and launches your project. This critical practice informs, inspires, and aligns everyone to a singular purpose: the successful delivery of software. This success is in your hands! Agile veterans Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies teach you how to organize and conduct liftoffs, hold team activities to discover what's most important, and offer a working framework for effective and lightweight agile chartering.

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior


Indi Young - 2008
    One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Building a DevOps Culture


Mandi Walls - 2013
    But, as Mandi Walls explains in this Velocity report, DevOps is really about changing company culture—replacing traditional development and operations silos with collaborative teams of people from both camps. The DevOps movement has produced some efficient teams turning out better products faster. The tough part is initiating the change. This report outlines strategies for managers looking to go beyond tools to build a DevOps culture among their technical staff. Topics include: Documenting reasons for changing to DevOps before you commit Defining meaningful and achievable goals Finding a technical leader to be an evangelist, tools and process expert, and shepherd Starting with a non-critical but substantial pilot project Facilitating open communication among developers, QA engineers, marketers, and other professionals Realigning your team’s responsibilities and incentives Learning when to mediate disagreements and conflicts Download this free report and learn how to the DevOps approach can help you create a supportive team environment built on communication, respect, and trust. Mandi Walls is a Senior Consultant with Opscode.

Test-Driven Web Development with Python


Harry Percival - 2010
    You’ll learn everything from the basics of database integration and the use of JavaScript to browser-automation tools like Selenium, and advanced topics such as NoSQL, Web Sockets, and async programming.Ideal for beginners, this book teaches a development methodology that leads to peace of mind, cleaner code, and better web apps.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software


Charles Petzold - 1999
    And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries. Using everyday objects and familiar language systems such as Braille and Morse code, author Charles Petzold weaves an illuminating narrative for anyone who’s ever wondered about the secret inner life of computers and other smart machines. It’s a cleverly illustrated and eminently comprehensible story—and along the way, you’ll discover you’ve gained a real context for understanding today’s world of PCs, digital media, and the Internet. No matter what your level of technical savvy, CODE will charm you—and perhaps even awaken the technophile within.

Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams


James Kalbach - 2015
    But it's worse when people inside these companies can't pinpoint the problem because they're too focused on business processes. This practical book shows your company how to use alignment diagrams to turn valuable customer observations into actionable insight. With this unique tool, you can visually map your existing customer experience and envision future solutions.Product and brand managers, marketing specialists, and business owners will learn how experience diagramming can help determine where business goals and customer perspectives intersect. Once you're armed with this data, you can provide users with real value.Mapping Experiences is divided into three parts:Understand the underlying principles of diagramming, and discover how these diagrams can inform strategyLearn how to create diagrams with the four iterative modes in the mapping process: setting up a mapping initiative, investigating the evidence, visualizing the process, and using diagrams in workshops and experimentsSee key diagrams in action, including service blueprints, customer journey maps, experience maps, mental models, and spatial maps and ecosystem models

Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing


Rex Black - 1999
    The preeminent expert in his field, Mr.Black draws upon years of experience as president of both theInternational and American Software Testing Qualifications boardsto offer this extensive resource of all the standards, methods, andtools you'll need.The book covers core testing concepts and thoroughly examinesthe best test management practices and tools of leading hardwareand software vendors. Step-by-step guidelines and real-worldscenarios help you follow all necessary processes and avoidmistakes.Producing high-quality computer hardware and software requirescareful, professional testing; Managing the Testing Process, Third Edition explains how to achieve that by following adisciplined set of carefully managed and monitored practices andprocessesThe book covers all standards, methods, and tools you need forprojects large and smallPresents the business case for testing products and reviews theauthor's latest test assessmentsTopics include agile testing methods, risk-based testing, IEEEstandards, ISTQB certification, distributed and outsourced testing, and moreOver 100 pages of new material and case studies have been addedto this new editionIf you're responsible for managing testing in the real world, Managing the Testing Process, Third Edition is the valuablereference and guide you need.

Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise


Scott W. Ambler - 2012
    Mainstream agile approaches that are indeed suitable for small projects require significant tailoring for larger, complex enterprise projects. In "Disciplined Agile Delivery," Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce IBM's breakthrough Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, which describes how to do this tailoring. DAD applies a more disciplined approach to agile development by acknowledging and dealing with the realities and complexities of a portfolio of interdependent program initiatives. Ambler and Lines show how to extend Scrum with supplementary agile and lean strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Unified Process (UP), and other proven methods to provide a hybrid approach that is adaptable to your organization's unique needs. They candidly describe what practices work best, why they work, what the trade-offs are, and when to consider alternatives, all within the context of your situation. "Disciplined Agile Delivery "addresses agile practices across the entire lifecycle, from requirements, architecture, and development to delivery and governance. The authors show how these best-practice techniques fit together in an end-to-end process for successfully delivering large, complex systems--from project initiation through delivery. Coverage includesScaling agile for mission-critical enterprise endeavorsAvoiding mistakes that drive poorly run agile projects to chaosEffectively initiating an agile projectTransitioning as an individual to agileIncrementally building consumable solutionsDeploying agile solutions into complex production environmentsLeveraging DevOps, architecture, and other enterprise disciplinesAdapting your governance strategy for agile projects Based on facts, research, and extensive experience, this book will be an indispensable resource for every enterprise software leader and practitioner--whether they're seeking to optimize their existing agile/Scrum process or improve the agility of an iterative process.

Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)


Marianne Bellotti - 2021
    Aging computer systems present complex technical challenges for organizations both large and small, and Kill It with Fire provides sound strategies for spearheading modernization efforts.Kill It with Fire examines aging computer systems, the evolution of technology over time, and how organizations can modernize, maintain, and future-proof their current systems.In playful and engaging prose, Marianne Bellotti uses real-world case studies to illustrate the technical challenges of modernizing complex legacy systems, as well as the organizational challenges of time-intensive maintenance efforts. The book explains how to evaluate existing architecture, create upgrade plans, and handle communication structures. Team exercises and historical analyses of complex computer systems make this a valuable resource for those in both older and newer companies, and will help readers restore or create systems built to evolve as time goes on.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts


Richard Monson-Haefel - 2009
    More than four dozen architects -- including Neal Ford, Michael Nygard, and Bill de hOra -- offer advice for communicating with stakeholders, eliminating complexity, empowering developers, and many more practical lessons they've learned from years of experience. Among the 97 principles in this book, you'll find useful advice such as:Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar) Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm) Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards) Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney) For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde) It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons) To be successful as a software architect, you need to master both business and technology. This book tells you what top software architects think is important and how they approach a project. If you want to enhance your career, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know is essential reading.

Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions


Luke Hohmann - 2003
    There are currently a significant number of books on creating, documenting, and implementing software architecture, but precious few resources have addressed how to build a software architecture that aligns with a customer's overall business goals. In this new book, Luke Hohmann borrows from his extensive experience managing successful enterprise software projects to provide practical wisdom on creating and sustaining winning software solutions. This book helps technologists grasp the business ramifications of their decisions, and provides business-oriented software professionals (e.g. sales people and marketers) with better knowledge of how robust software can be built and maintained.

The Linux Command Line


William E. Shotts Jr. - 2012
    Available here:readmeaway.com/download?i=1593279523The Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition: A Complete Introduction PDF by William ShottsRead The Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition: A Complete Introduction PDF from No Starch Press,William ShottsDownload William Shotts’s PDF E-book The Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition: A Complete Introduction

Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community


Richard P. Gabriel - 1996
    But while most of us today can work a computer--albeit with the help of the ever-present computer software manual--we know little about what goes on inside the box and virtually nothing about software designor the world of computer programming. In Patterns of Software, the respected software pioneer and computer scientist, Richard Gabriel, gives us an informative inside look at the world of software design and computer programming and the business that surrounds them. In this wide-ranging volume, Gabriel discusses such topics as whatmakes a successful programming language, how the rest of the world looks at and responds to the work of computer scientists, how he first became involved in computer programming and software development, what makes a successful software business, and why his own company, Lucid, failed in 1994, tenyears after its inception. Perhaps the most interesting and enlightening section of the book is Gabriel's detailed look at what he believes are the lessons that can be learned from architect Christopher Alexander, whose books--including the seminal A Pattern Language--have had a profound influence on the computer programmingcommunity. Gabriel illuminates some of Alexander's key insights--the quality without a name, pattern languages, habitability, piecemeal growth--and reveals how these influential architectural ideas apply equally well to the construction of a computer program. Gabriel explains the concept ofhabitability, for example, by comparing a program to a New England farmhouse and the surrounding structures which slowly grow and are modified according to the needs and desires of the people who live and work on the farm. Programs live and grow, and their inhabitants--the programmers--need to workwith that program the way the farmer works with the homestead. Although computer scientists and software entrepreneurs will get much out of this book, the essays are accessible to everyone and will intrigue anyone curious about Silicon Valley, computer programming, or the world of high technology.

Ship It!


Jared Richardson - 2005
    You'll get quick, easy-to-follow advice on modern practices: which to use, and when they should be applied. This book avoids current fashion trends and marketing hype; instead, readers find page after page of solid advice, all tried and tested in the real world.Aimed at beginning to intermediate programmers, Ship It! will show you:Which tools help, and which don't How to keep a project moving Approaches to scheduling that work How to build developers as well as product What's normal on a project, and what's not How to manage managers, end-users and sponsors Danger signs and how to fix them Few of the ideas presented here are controversial or extreme; most experienced programmers will agree that this stuff works. Yet 50 to 70 percent of all project teams in the U.S. aren't able to use even these simple, well-accepted practices effectively. This book will help you get started.Ship It! begins by introducing the common technical infrastructure that every project needs to get the job done. Readers can choose from a variety of recommended technologies according to their skills and budgets. The next sections outline the necessary steps to get software out the door reliably, using well-accepted, easy-to-adopt, best-of-breed practices that really work.Finally, and most importantly, Ship It! presents common problems that teams face, then offers real-world advice on how to solve them.

The RSpec Book


David Chelimsky - 2009
    Get the most out of BDD in Ruby with The RSpec Book, written by the lead developer of RSpec, David Chelimsky. You'll get started right away with RSpec 2 and Cucumber by developing a simple game, using Cucumber to express high-level requirements in language your customer understands, and RSpec to express more granular requirements that focus on the behavior of individual objects in the system. You'll learn how to use test doubles (mocks and stubs) to control the environment and focus the RSpec examples on one object at a time, and how to customize RSpec to "speak" in the language of your domain. You'll develop Rails 3 applications and use companion tools such as Webrat and Selenium to express requirements for web applications both in memory and in the browser. And you'll learn to specify Rails views, controllers, and models, each in complete isolation from the other. Whether you're developing applications, frameworks, or the libraries that power them, The RSpec Book will help you write better code, better tests, and deliver better software to happier users.