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.

    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.

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

    Agile Coaching de-mystifies agile practices--it's a practical guide to creating strong agile teams. Packed with useful tips from practicing agile coaches Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, this book gives you coaching tools that you can apply whether you are a project manager, a technical lead, or working in a software team. To lead change, you need to expand your toolkit, and this book gives you the tools you need to make the transition from agile practitioner to agile coach. Agile Coaching is all about working with people to create great agile teams. You'll learn how to build a team that produces great software and has fun doing it. In the process, you'll grow a team that's self-sufficient and skillful. This book provides you with deeper knowledge of how agile practices work and how to inspire your team to improve. Discover how to coach your team through the agile lifecycle, from planning to writing software. Learn the secrets of running effective agile meetings and how to get your team following a consistent approach to creating software. You'll find chapters dedicated to introducing Test-Driven Development, designing Retrospectives, and making progress visible. Find out what works and what to avoid when introducing agile practices to your team. Throughout the book the authors share their personal coaching stories from experience with real teams, giving you insights into what works and what to avoid. Each chapter also covers hurdles that you and your team may face and what to do to clear them.

    Along the way, they introduce 22 thinking tools that can help you customize the right agile practices for any environment.Better, cheaper, faster software development. You can have all three-if you adopt the same lean principles that have already revolutionized manufacturing, logistics and product development.Iterating towards excellence: software development as an exercise in discovery Managing uncertainty: decide as late as possible by building change into the system. Compressing the value stream: rapid development, feedback, and improvement Empowering teams and individuals without compromising coordination Software with integrity: promoting coherence, usability, fitness, maintainability, and adaptability How to see the whole-even when your developers are scattered across multiple locations and contractors Simply put, Lean Software Development helps you refocus development on value, flow, and people-so you can achieve breakthrough quality, savings, speed, and business alignment.

    Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. We hope that this book helps you and your teams to do retrospectives effectively and efficiently to reflect upon your ways of working, and continuously improve them!

    Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo's Management 3.0 model recognizes that today's organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Management 3.0 doesn't offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them. Coverage includes - Getting beyond "Management 1.0" control and "Management 2.0" fads - Understanding how complexity affects your organization - Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated - Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own - Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals - Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship - Crafting an organizational network that promotes success - Implementing continuous improvement that actually works Thoroughly pragmatic-and never trendy-Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

    Think about how many times you have been asked that question. How many times have you ever actually been right?We can debate all we want whether this is a fair question to ask given the tremendous amount of uncertainty in knowledge work, but the truth of the matter is that our customers are going to inquire about completion time whether we like it or not. Which means we need to come up with an accurate way to answer them. The problem is that the forecasting tools that we currently utilize have made us ill-equipped to provide accurate answers to reasonable customer questions. Until now.

    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.

    A pocket-sized overview of roles, artifacts and the sprint cycle, adapted from the bestseller The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson

    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.

    It will allow you to avoid some likely pitfalls and it will guide you to asking, yourself and your clients, the right questions. Though many people focus on the visualization techniques in Kanban the true value only emerges when you, as a kanban system manager, are apt at noticing the anti-patterns that occur on the kanban board and are able to take appropriate actions. David generously shares his vast experience in this field, with plenty real case scenarios, to the benefit of the reader. After reading this book I toyed with the idea: Would I've changed my approach to coaching my previous clients, in their adoption of agile values and practices, had I read this at the time? Well, I certainly would have, for all of them, and I'm sure it would have meant a smoother change process for the agilely challenged organizations. David provides a comprehensive guide to implementing Kanban in a software development/maintenance environment. Covering the mechanics, dynamics, principles and rationale behind why Kanban is a so promising framework for managing the work of a variety of teams and groups and being an evolutionary-based change management driver. Kanban is the practical approach to implement Lean Software Development, and this book is the practical guide for how to start using Kanban, and how to adapt the system for advanced needs. The book is clear and flowing, even though it covers some quite technical material. I would recommend it to Development managers, Project/Program managers, Agile Coaches/Consultants. It addresses concerns/needs of Novice as well as those already familiar with Kanban and looking for advanced answers. Even if you don't intend to implement a kanban system, there are a lot of techniques and ideas that are easily applicable to any product development/maintenance environment, agile or not. Bottom line, highly recommended.

    What if your software-intensive projects delivered on time - or early - without sacrificing quality? 2. What if your IT department's job was to deliver profits, through software, rather than just software? 3. What if your software developers worked in a way they loved - that didn't feel as if they spent their days ROLLING ROCKS UPHILL? ROLLING ROCKS DOWNHILL is a business novel in the tradition of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal". It introduces Throughput-Driven Development - the combination of Lean, Agile and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC) thinking to corporate software development.

    This book demystifies agile methodologies: why they’re designed the way they are, what problems they address, and the values, principles, and ideas they embody.Learning Agile helps you recognize the principles that apply to development problems specific to your team, company, and projects. You’ll discover how to use that information to guide your choice of methodologies and practices.With this book you’ll learn:Values that effective software teams possessThe methodologies that embody those valuesThe practices that make up those methodologiesAnd principles that help you bring those values, methodologies, and practices to your team and your company

    It already drives most of the world’s top technology companies. And now it’s starting to spread to every domain where leaders wrestle with complex projects. If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid – or compelling – explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago. The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact. In this book you’ll journey to Scrum’s front lines where Jeff’s system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable – whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.