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.

    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

    

    Mastering large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century, just as mass production defined the landscape in the 20th. Unfortunately, business and technology leaders outside of the tech giants are woefully ill-equipped to solve the problems posed by digital transformation. A new approach is needed.In Project to Product, value stream network pioneer and technology leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework. This new way of building an infrastructure for innovation will change the way enterprises think about software delivery, enabling every organization the opportunity to win a portion of the $18.5 trillion (IDC) that will be created annually through better software delivery.Project to Product provides leaders the missing framework needed to create the technology equivalent of an advanced manufacturing line, across thousands of IT professionals, and enables optimizing value creation across the entire organization. This book is ideal for C-suite leadership and IT management at every level.

    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.

    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.

    However, data structures for these languages do not always translate well to functional languages such as Standard ML, Haskell, or Scheme. This book describes data structures from the point of view of functional languages, with examples, and presents design techniques that allow programmers to develop their own functional data structures. The author includes both classical data structures, such as red-black trees and binomial queues, and a host of new data structures developed exclusively for functional languages. All source code is given in Standard ML and Haskell, and most of the programs are easily adaptable to other functional languages. This handy reference for professional programmers working with functional languages can also be used as a tutorial or for self-study.

    The Reactive Application model addresses these demands through new patterns designed to "react" effectively to user and system events, changes in load, competition for shared system resources, and unanticipated failures. Although reactive design patterns can be implemented using standard enterprise development tools, you best realize the benefits when you pair them with a functional programming language like Scala and an Actor-based concurrency system like Akka.Reactive Design Patterns is a clearly-written guide for building event-driven distributed systems that are resilient, responsive, and scalable. Written by the authors of the Reactive Manifesto, this book teaches you to apply reactive design principles to the real problems of distributed application development. You'll discover technologies and paradigms that can be used to build reactive applications including Akka and other actor-based systems, functional programming, replication and distribution, and implementation techniques such as futures, iteratees, and reactive streams. While the book presents concrete examples in Scala, Java, JavaScript, and Erlang, the primary goal is to introduce patterns and best practices that you can use to apply reactive principles to common problems you'll face when building distributed systems.WHAT'S INSIDE* Discover best practices and patterns for building responsive applications* Build applications that can withstand hardware or software failure at any level* Patterns for fault tolerance, scalability, and responsiveness* Maximize multicore hardware using asynchronous and event-driven solutions* Scale applications under tremendous loadReaders should be familiar with a standard programming language like Java, C++ or C# and be comfortable with the basics of distributed systems. Software engineers and architects will learn how to avoid common pitfalls and apply patterns for solving day-to-day problems in a fault-tolerant and scalable way to maximize their application's responsiveness to users and clients. Project leaders and CTOs will gain a deeper understanding of the philosophy behind resilience and scalability in distributed systems, as well as their limitations, challenges and benefits.

    They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies.The Poppendiecks organize this book around the crucial concept of frames, the unspoken mental constructs that shape our perspectives and control our behavior in ways we rarely notice. For software leaders and team members, some frames lead to long-term failure, while others offer a strong foundation for success. Drawing on decades of experience, the authors present twenty-four frames that offer a coherent, complete framework for leading lean software development. You'll discover powerful new ways to act as competency leader, product champion, improvement mentor, front-line leader, and even visionary.Systems thinking: focusing on customers, bringing predictability to demand, and revamping policies that cause inefficiency Technical excellence: implementing low-dependency architectures, TDD, and evolutionary development processes, and promoting deeper developer expertise Reliable delivery: managing your biggest risks more effectively, and optimizing both workflow and schedules Relentless improvement: seeing problems, solving problems, sharing the knowledge Great people: finding and growing professionals with purpose, passion, persistence, and pride Aligned leaders: getting your entire leadership team on the same page From the world's number one experts in Lean software development, Leading Lean Software Development will be indispensable to everyone who wants to transform the promise of lean into reality--in enterprise IT and software companies alike.

    Over the past five years, authors Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher have analyzed hundreds of examples of "bad code" (much of it their own) to determine why they’re bad and how they could be improved. Their conclusion? You need to write code that minimizes the time it would take someone else to understand it—even if that someone else is you.This book focuses on basic principles and practical techniques you can apply every time you write code. Using easy-to-digest code examples from different languages, each chapter dives into a different aspect of coding, and demonstrates how you can make your code easy to understand.Simplify naming, commenting, and formatting with tips that apply to every line of codeRefine your program’s loops, logic, and variables to reduce complexity and confusionAttack problems at the function level, such as reorganizing blocks of code to do one task at a timeWrite effective test code that is thorough and concise—as well as readable"Being aware of how the code you create affects those who look at it later is an important part of developing software. The authors did a great job in taking you through the different aspects of this challenge, explaining the details with instructive examples." —Michael Hunger, passionate Software Developer

    You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes.This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.

    It took the open source world by storm since its inception in 2005, and is used by small development shops and giants like Google, Red Hat, and IBM, and of course many open source projects.A book by Git experts to turn you into a Git expert. Introduces the world of distributed version control Shows how to build a Git development workflow.

    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.

    This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole--a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:SyntaxObjectsFunctionsInheritanceArraysRegular expressionsMethodsStyleBeautiful featuresThe real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.