The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future


J.J. Sutherland - 2019
    Based on the five years of work in the field with companies like Toyota, 3M, Schlumberger, and Autodesk, The Scrum Fieldbook offers a hands on approach to implementing the practices of the Scrum framework among traditional, non-technology companies.In J.J. Sutherland's first book, Scrum, written with his father, Jeff, he laid out the Scrum framework used by almost all of today's leading technology companies, based on Agile software development. The book has gone on to sell over 120,000 copies in its print and ebooks editions, and another 95,000 copies as an audio download. Since publication, the Scrum framework has exploded across the corporate world. J.J. and his team at Scrum Inc. have worked with private space companies, global oil and gas firms, banks, medical device manufacturers, and firms on the cutting edge of genetic science.In the Scrum Fieldbook, J.J. takes leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and opportunities the company has faced in working with major established companies like Toyota, 3M, Schlumberger, and Autodesk. He shows how the simple scrum framework can be successfully applied to any situation, and in every industry, from automobile manufacturers in the USA and Europe, to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from building fighter planes to improving the banking industry.

The Art of Agile Development


James Shore - 2007
    Plenty of books describe what agile development is or why it helps software projects succeed, but very few combine information for developers, managers, testers, and customers into a single package that they can apply directly. This book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience with Extreme Programming (XP). You get a gestalt view of the agile development process, including comprehensive guidance for non-technical readers and hands-on technical practices for developers and testers. The Art of Agile Development gives you clear answers to questions such as:How can we adopt agile development? Do we really need to pair program? What metrics should we report? What if I can't get my customer to participate? How much documentation should we write? When do we design and architect? As a non-developer, how should I work with my agile team? Where is my product roadmap? How does QA fit in? The book teaches you how to adopt XP practices, describes each practice in detail, then discusses principles that will allow you to modify XP and create your own agile method. In particular, this book tackles the difficult aspects of agile development: the need for cooperation and trust among team members. Whether you're currently part of an agile team, working with an agile team, or interested in agile development, this book provides the practical tips you need to start practicing agile development. As your experience grows, the book will grow with you, providing exercises and information that will teach you first to understand the rules of agile development, break them, and ultimately abandon rules altogether as you master the art of agile development. "Jim Shore and Shane Warden expertly explain the practices and benefits of Extreme Programming. They offer advice from their real-world experiences in leading teams. They answer questions about the practices and show contraindications - ways that a practice may be mis-applied. They offer alternatives you can try if there are impediments to applying a practice, such as the lack of an on-site customer. --Ken Pugh, Author of Jolt Award Winner, Prefactoring "I will leave a copy of this book with every team I visit." --Brian Marick, Exampler Consulting

SAFe 4.5 Distilled: Applying the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises


Richard Knaster - 2018
    SAFe addresses this primary goal, and offers these further benefits: reduced time-to-market, improved quality, stronger alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaboration across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time." --Sundaresan Jagadeesan, SW CoE Program Director, Philips To succeed in today's adapt-or-die marketplace, businesses must be able to rapidly change the way they create and deliver value to their customers. Hundreds of the world's most successful companies-including Intel, Capital One, AstraZeneca, Cisco, and Philips-have turned to the Scaled Agile Framework(R) (SAFe(R)) to achieve agility at scale and maintain a competitive edge. SAFe(R) 4.5 Distilled: Applying the Scaled Agile Framework(R) for Lean Enterprises explains how adopting SAFe can quickly improve time to market and increase productivity, quality, and employee engagement. In this book, you will Understand the business case for SAFe: its benefits, the problems it solves, and how to apply it Get an overview of SAFe across all parts of the business: team, program, value stream, and portfolio Learn why SAFe works: the power of SAFe's Lean-Agile mindset, values, and principles Discover how systems thinking, Agile development, and Lean product development form the underlying basis for SAFe Learn how to become a Lean-Agile leader and effectively drive an enterprise-wide transformation Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders


Jean Tabaka - 2006
    As an agile coach, I've found the combination of straightforward advice and colorful anecdotes to be invaluable in guiding and focusing interactions with my teams. Jean's wealth of experience is conveyed in a carefully struck balance of reference guides and prose, facilitating just-in-time learning in the agile spirit. All in all, a superb resource for building stronger teams that's fit for agile veterans and neophytes alike." --Arlen Bankston, Lean Agile Practice Manager, CC Pace "If Agile is the new 'what, ' then surely Collaboration is the new 'how.' There are many things I really like about Jean's new book. Right at the top of the list is that I don't have to make lists of ideas for collaboration and facilitation anymore. Jean has it all. Not only does she have those great ideas for meetings, retrospectives, and team decision-making that I need to remember, but the startling new and thought-provoking ideas are there too. And the stories, the stories, the stories! The best way to transfer wisdom. Thanks, Jean!" --Linda Rising, Independent Consultant The Hands-On Guide to Effective Collaboration in Agile Projects To succeed, an agile project demands outstanding collaboration among all its stakeholders. But great collaboration doesn't happen by itself; it must be carefully planned and facilitated throughout the entire project lifecycle. Collaboration Explained is the first book to bring together proven, start-to-finish techniques for ensuring effective collaboration in any agile software project. Since the early days of the agile movement, Jean Tabaka has been studying and promoting collaboration in agile environments. Drawing on her unsurpassed experience, she offers clear guidelines and easy-to-use collaboration templates for every significant project event: from iteration and release planning, through project chartering, all the way through post-project retrospectives. Tabaka's hands-on techniques are applicable to every leading agile methodology, from Extreme Programming and Scrum to Crystal Clear. Above all, they are practical: grounded in a powerful understanding of the technical, business, and human challenges you face as a project manager or development team member. - Build collaborative software development cultures, leaders, and teams - Prepare yourself to collaborate--and prepare your team - Define clear roles for each participant in promoting collaboration - Set your collaborative agenda - Master tools for organizing collaboration more efficiently - Run effective collaborative meetings--including brainstorming sessions - Promote better small-group and pair-programming collaboration - Get better information, and use it to make better decisions - Use non-abusive conflict to drive positive outcomes - Collaborate to estimate projects and schedules more accurately - Strengthen collaboration across distributed, virtual teams - Extend collaboration from individual projects to the entire development organization

The Psychology of Computer Programming


Gerald M. Weinberg - 1971
    Weinberg adds new insights and highlights the similarities and differences between now and then. Using a conversational style that invites the reader to join him, Weinberg reunites with some of his most insightful writings on the human side of software engineering.Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, and much more.Dorset House Publishing is proud to make this important text available to new generations of programmers -- and to encourage readers of the first edition to return to its valuable lessons.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering


Frederick P. Brooks Jr. - 1975
    With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 45 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.The added chapters contain (1) a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks' central argument in The Mythical Man-Month: that large programming projects suffer management problems different from small ones due to the division of labor; that the conceptual integrity of the product is therefore critical; and that it is difficult but possible to achieve this unity; (2) Brooks' view of these propositions a generation later; (3) a reprint of his classic 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet"; and (4) today's thoughts on the 1986 assertion, "There will be no silver bullet within ten years."

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?

Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work Flow and Align People for Organizational Transformation: Using Lean Business Practices to Transform Office and Service Environments


Karen Martin - 2013
    It gives you the tools to address a wider range of important VSM issues than any other such book, including the psychology of change, leadership, creating teams, building consensus, and charter development.Karen Martin is principal consultant for Karen Martin & Associates, LLC, instructor for the University of California, San Diego's Lean Enterprise program, and industry advisor to the University of San Diego's Industrial and Systems Engineering program. Mike Osterling provides support and leadership to manufacturing and non-manufacturing organizations on their Lean Transformation Journey. In a continuous improvement leadership role for six years, Mike played a key role in Square D Company's lean transformation in the 1990s.

More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team


Janet Gregory - 2014
    They address crucial emerging issues, share evolved agile practices, and cover key issues agile testers have asked to learn more about. Packed with new examples from real teams, this insightful guide offers detailed information about adapting agile testing for your environment; learning from experience and continually improving your test processes; scaling agile testing across teams; and overcoming the pitfalls of automated testing. You ll find brand-new coverage of agile testing for the enterprise, distributed teams, mobile/embedded systems, regulated environments, data warehouse/BI systems, and DevOps practices. You ll come away understanding How to clarify testing activities within the team Ways to collaborate with business experts to identify valuable features and deliver the right capabilities How to design automated tests for superior reliability and easier maintenance How agile team members can improve and expand their testing skills How to plan just enough, balancing small increments with larger feature sets and the entire system How to use testing to identify and mitigate risks associated with your current agile processes and to prevent defects How to address challenges within your product or organizational context How to perform exploratory testing using personas and tours Exploratory testing approaches that engage the whole team, using test charters with session- and thread-based techniques How to bring new agile testers up to speed quickly without overwhelming them The eBook edition of "More Agile Testing" also is available as part of a two-eBook collection, "The Agile Testing Collection" (9780134190624)."

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises


Dean Leffingwell - 2007
    What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell's book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell's book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development." -Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management "There's tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell's observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he's been there, done that, and has seen what's worked." -Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale. Foreword Preface Acknowledgments About the Author Part I: Overview of Software Agility Chapter 1: Introduction to Agile Methods Chapter 2: Why the Waterfall Model Doesn't Work Chapter 3: The Essence of XP Chapter 4: The Essence of Scrum Chapter 5: The Essence of RUP Chapter 6: Lean Software, DSDM, and FDD Chapter 7: The Essence of Agile Chapter 8: The Challenge of Scaling Agile Part II: Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale Chapter 9: The Define/Build/Test Component Team Chapter 10: Two Levels of Planning and Tracking Chapter 11: Mastering the Iteration Chapter 12: Smaller, More Frequent Releases Chapter 13: Concurrent Testing Chapter 14: Continuous Integration Chapter 15: Regular Reflection and Adaptation Part III: Creating the Agile Enterprise Chapter 16: Intentional Architecture Chapter 17: Lean Requirements at Scale: Vision, Roadmap, and Just-in-Time Elaboration Chapter 18: Systems of Systems and the Agile Release Train Chapter 19: Managing Highly Distributed Development Chapter 20: Impact on Customers and Operations Chapter 21: Changing the Organization Chapter 22: Measuring Business Performance Conclusion: Agility Works at Scale Bibliography Index

Scrum Shortcuts Without Cutting Corners: Agile Tactics, Tools, & Tips


Ilan Goldstein - 2013
    But when new Scrum practitioners attempt to apply Scrum theory and high-level approaches in actual projects, they often find it surprisingly difficult. In Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners, Scrum expert Ilan Goldstein helps you translate the Scrum framework into reality to meet the Scrum challenges your formal training never warned you about. Drawing on his extensive agile experience in a wide range of projects and environments, Goldstein presents thirty proven, flexible shortcuts for optimizing Scrum processes, actions, and outcomes. Each shortcut walks you through applying a Scrum approach to achieve a tangible output. These easy-to-digest, actionable patterns address a broad range of topics including getting started, quality and metrics, team members and roles, managing stakeholders, estimation, continuous improvement and much more. Whatever your role, Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners will help you take your Scrum skills to the next level and achieve better results in any project you participate in.

Training from the Back of the Room!: 65 Ways to Step Aside and Let Them Learn


Sharon L. Bowman - 2008
    Bowman, the author of the best-selling Ten-Minute Trainer, comes the dynamic new book, Training from the BACK of the Room! This innovative resource introduces 65 training strategies that are guaranteed to deliver outstanding training results no matter what the topic, group, or learning environment. Now, trainers can replace the traditional Trainers talk; learners listen paradigm with a radical new model for designing and delivering instruction: When learners talk and teach, they learn.

Debugging Teams: Better Productivity Through Collaboration


Brian W. Fitzpatrick - 2015
    Their conclusion? Even among people who have spent decades learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven't really focused on the human component. Learning to collaborate is just as important to success. If you invest in the soft skills of your job, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort.The authors share their insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users of your software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks--including Working with Poisonous People--has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

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.

How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead


Jeff Atwood - 2013
    He needed a way to keep track of software development over time – whatever he was thinking about or working on. He researched subjects he found interesting, then documented his research with a public blog post, which he could easily find and refer to later. Over time, increasing numbers of blog visitors found the posts helpful, relevant and interesting. Now, approximately 100,000 readers visit the blog per day and nearly as many comment and interact on the site.In “How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead” you’ll find a thought-provoking and entertaining collection of Jeff’s writings on several programming-related topics.