Not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. You're well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware--our own brains? Learning new skills and new technology is critical to your career, and it's all in your head. In this book by Andy Hunt, you'll learn how our brains are wired, and how to take advantage of your brain's architecture. You'll learn new tricks and tips to learn more, faster, and retain more of what you learn. You need a pragmatic approach to thinking and learning. You need to Refactor Your Wetware. Programmers have to learn constantly; not just the stereotypical new technologies, but also the problem domain of the application, the whims of the user community, the quirks of your teammates, the shifting sands of the industry, and the evolving characteristics of the project itself as it is built. We'll journey together through bits of cognitive and neuroscience, learning and behavioral theory. You'll see some surprising aspects of how our brains work, and how you can take advantage of the system to improve your own learning and thinking skills.In this book you'll learn how to:Use the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to become more expertLeverage the architecture of the brain to strengthen different thinking modesAvoid common "known bugs" in your mindLearn more deliberately and more effectivelyManage knowledge more efficientlyPrinted in full color.

    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

    It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.

    In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally.The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the otherhand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge.To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firmsas Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designerscouldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself with the master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, thebest management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call middle-up-down, in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline.As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the knowledge society, one that is drastically different from the industrial society, and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a stepfurther, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future.Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to makesuccessful new products, services, and systems.

    The book has helped shift the conversation from what's broken with management today to what's possible. It is inspiring thousands of organizations--corporations and nonprofits, schools and hospitals--to adopt radically more powerful, soulful, and purposeful practices.The book resonates widely, but not everyone has time to devote to a dense 360-page management book. This illustrated version conveys the main ideas of the original book and shares many of its real-life stories in a lively, engaging way. Don't be surprised if you find it hard to put down and end up reading it almost in one sitting. Welcome to the conversation on next-stage organizations!

    The book will do that through examples of how innovative practices can dramatically improve the success of change programs. These practices combine ideas from the Agile, Lean Startup, change management, organizational development and psychology communities. This book will change how you think about change. In this book we will cover: Why does change resistance emerge and what you should NOT do about it. And of course, how to harness that human reaction to the benefit of all involved in the change process. Step-by-step descriptions of how we combined ideas from many change methods and frameworks to develop a customized change management process that was right for The Commission. How you can customize your own change program just like we did at The Commission. How you can involve the people affected in the change in the design of that change. Directly contributing to the success of the change program. A newly appointed CIO had shaken the place up with some big changes, including a transition away from traditional management practices and towards Agile practices. How to implement these modern approaches to management in a very traditional organization? A new approach to change was needed. Lean Change Management was needed. This book describes how myself and team of change agents helped The Commission transform from an old-school public sector to a modern Agile organization. Was it easy? Of course not. But it was possible because of the innovative practices for Change Management that I describe in this book.

    . .Most developers, testers, and managers on IT projects are pretty good at recognizing patterns of behavior and gut-level hunches, as in, I sense that this project is headed for disaster.But it has always been more difficult to transform these patterns and hunches into a usable form, something a team can debate, refine, and use. Until now.In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the six principal consultants of The Atlantic Systems Guild present the patterns of behavior they most often observe at the dozens of IT firms they transform each year, around the world.The result is a quick-read guide to identifying nearly ninety typical scenarios, drawing on a combined one-hundred-and-fifty years of project management experience. Project by project, you'll improve the accuracy of your hunches and your ability to act on them. The patterns are presented in an easy-reference format, with names designed to ease communication with your teammates. In just a few words, you can describe what's happening on your project. Citing the patterns of behavior can help you quickly move those above and below you to the next step on your project. You'll find classic patterns such as these:* News Improvement* Management By Mood Ring* Piling On* Rattle Yer Dags* Natural Authority* Food++* Fridge Door* and more than eighty more!Not every pattern will be evident in your organization, and not every pattern is necessarily good or bad. However, you'll find many patterns that will apply to your current and future assignments, even in the most ambiguous circumstances. When you assess your situation and follow your next hunch, you'll have the collective wisdom of six world-class consultants at your side.

    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

    Now astrophysicist John Gribbin draws on his expertise to explore, in prose that communicates not only the wonder but the substance of cutting-edge science, the principles behind chaos and complexity. He reveals the remarkable ways these two revolutionary theories have been applied over the last twenty years to explain all sorts of phenomena–from weather patterns to mass extinctions.Grounding these paradigm-shifting ideas in their historical context, Gribbin also traces their development from Newton to Darwin to Lorenz, Prigogine, and Lovelock, demonstrating how–far from overturning all that has gone before–chaos and complexity are the triumphant extensions of simple scientific laws. Ultimately, Gribbin illustrates how chaos and complexity permeate the universe on every scale, governing the evolution of life and galaxies alike.

    Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.

    It’s helpful for learning Agile and Scrum, and also for a basic preparation for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master level 1). It can also act as a simple reference for Scrum practitioners.

    If you're one of them, The Scrum Field Guide will give you skills and confidence to adopt Scrum more rapidly, more successfully, and with far less pain and fear. Long-time Scrum practitioner Mitch Lacey identifies major challenges associated with early-stage Scrum adoption, as well as deeper issues that emerge after companies have adopted Scrum, and describes how other organizations have overcome them. You'll learn how to gain "quick wins" that build support, and then use the flexibility of Scrum to maximize value creation across the entire process. In 30 brief, engaging chapters, Lacey guides you through everything from defining roles to setting priorities to determining team velocity, choosing a sprint length, and conducting customer reviews. Along the way, he explains why Scrum can seem counterintuitive, offers a solid grounding in the core agile concepts that make it work, and shows where it can (and shouldn't) be modified. Coverage includes Getting teams on board, and bringing new team members aboard after you've started Creating a "definition of done" for the team and organization Implementing the strong technical practices that are indispensable for agile success Balancing predictability and adaptability in release planning Keeping defects in check Running productive daily standup meetings Keeping people engaged with pair programming Managing culture clashes on Scrum teams Performing "emergency procedures" to get sprints back on track Establishing a pace your team can truly sustain Accurately costing projects, and measuring the value they deliver Documenting Scrum projects effectively Prioritizing and estimating large backlogs Integrating outsourced and offshored components Packed with real-world examples from Lacey's own experience, this book is invaluable to everyone transitioning to agile: developers, architects, testers, managers, and project owners alike.

    Using it, scientists can find order emerging from seemingly random interactions of all kinds, from something as simple as flipping coins through to more challenging problems such as the patterns in modern jazz, the growth of cancer tumours, and predicting shopping habits.

    The science of complexity studies how single elements, such as a species or a stock, spontaneously organize into complicated structures like ecosystems and economies; stars become galaxies, and snowflakes avalanches almost as if these systems were obeying a hidden yearning for order. Drawing from diverse fields, scientific luminaries such as Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow are studying complexity at a think tank called The Santa Fe Institute. The revolutionary new discoveries researchers have made there could change the face of every science from biology to cosmology to economics. M. Mitchell Waldrop's groundbreaking bestseller takes readers into the hearts and minds of these scientists to tell the story behind this scientific revolution as it unfolds.

    The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently. In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period: Emergence over AuthorityPull over PushCompasses over MapsRisk over SafetyDisobedience over CompliancePractice over TheoryDiversity over AbilityResilience over StrengthSystems over Objects Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.