Getting Results from Software Development Teams


Book Description

Learn best practices for software development project management—and lead your teams and projects to success. Dr. Lawrence Peters is an industry-recognized expert with decades of experience conducting research and leading real-world software projects. Beyond getting the best developers, equipment, budget, and timeline possible—Peters concludes that no factor is more critical to project success than the manager’s role. Drawing on proven practices from allied industries such as business, psychology, accounting, and law, he describes a broader project-management methodology—with principles that software managers can readily adapt to help increase their own effectiveness and the productivity of their teams. Unlike other books on the topic, this book focuses squarely on the manager—and shows how to get results without adopting philosophies from Genghis Khan or Machiavelli. (There is mention of Godzilla, however.) Packed with real-world examples and pragmatic advice, this book shows any software development manager—new or experienced—how to lead teams in delivering the right results for their business.




Building Software Teams


Book Description

Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process. As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team. Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approach Translate those goals to a verifiable Definition of Done Manage code versions for consistent and predictable modification Control separate environments for each stage in the development pipeline Automate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectations Let the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for you Automate the process of pushing code through the pipeline Define development process standards to improve consistency and simplicity Manage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to date Document only the most necessary and current knowledge




Building Great Software Engineering Teams


Book Description

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management “Tyler’s book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager.” —Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 “Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley—the high-functioning software team.” —Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know—Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.




Leading a Software Development Team


Book Description

Practical advice on leading a software development team, aimed at software engineers who have become project leaders.




Zombie Scrum Survival Guide


Book Description

Escape “Zombie Scrum” and Get Real Value from Agile! “Professional Scrum and Zombie Scrum are mortal enemies in eternal combat. If you relax your guard, Zombie Scrum comes back. This guide helps you stay on your guard, providing very practical tips for identifying when you have become a Zombie and how to stop this from happening. A must-have for any Zombie Scrum hunter.” --Dave West, CEO, Scrum.org “Barry, Christiaan, and Johannes have done a magnificent job of accumulating successful experiences and sharing their inspiring stories in this very practical book. They don't shy away from telling it like it is, which is why their proposals are always as useful as they are grounded in reality.” --Henri Lipmanowicz, cofounder, Liberating Structures Millions of professionals use Scrum. It is the #1 approach to agile software development in the world. Even so, by some estimates, over 70% of Scrum adoptions fall flat. Developers find themselves using “Zombie Scrum” processes that look like Scrum, but are slow, lifeless, and joyless. Scrum is just not working for them. Zombie Scrum Survival Guide reveals why Scrum runs aground and shows how to supercharge your Scrum outcomes, while having a lot more fun along the way. Humorous, visual, and extremely relatable, it offers practical approaches, exercises, and tools for escaping Zombie Scrum. Even if you are surrounded by skeptics, this book will be the antidote to help you build more of what users need, ship faster, improve more continuously, interact more successfully in any team, and feel a whole lot better about what you are doing. Suddenly, one day soon, you will remember: that is why we adopted Scrum in the first place! Learn how Zombie Scrum infects you, why it spreads, and how to inoculate yourself Get closer to your stakeholders, and wake up to their understanding of value Discover why Zombie teams can't learn, and what to do about it Clear away the specific obstacles to real continuous improvement Make self-managed teams real so people can behave like humans, not Zombies Zombie Scrum Survival Guide is for Scrum Masters, Scrum practitioners, Agile coaches and leaders, and everyone who wants to transform the promises of Scrum into reality. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




TSP(SM) Coaching Development Teams


Book Description

Most modern software development projects require teams, and good teamwork largely determines a project’s success. The Team Software Process (TSP), created by Watts S. Humphrey, is a set of engineering practices and team concepts that produce effective teams, thereby helping developers deliver high-quality products on time and within budget. TSP bridges Humphrey’s seminal work on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), an improvement framework for the entire software organization, and his Personal Software Process (PSP), practices designed to improve the work of individual developers. Typical first-time TSP teams increase productivity by more than 50 percent while greatly increasing the quality of their delivered products. However, TSP teams only continue to improve under the guidance of a capable coach. One industrial-strength team, for example, increased its productivity by an additional 94 percent and reduced test defects by 85 percent through three consecutive TSP quarterly product release cycles. Without competent coaching, teams often do not progress much beyond the initial one-time improvement seen after the introduction of the TSP. Humphrey distinguishes between TSP coaching and TSP leadership, explaining why the skillful performance of both functions is critical. In this practical guide, he shares coaching methods that have repeatedly inspired TSP teams and steered them toward success. With the help of a coach, TSP teams undergo a brief but intense project launch in which they define their own processes, make their own plans, and negotiate their commitments with management, resulting in dramatically enhanced performance. Whether you are considering the TSP or are actively implementing it, TSPSM–Coaching Development Teams provides the invaluable examples, guidelines, and suggestions you need to get started and keep developing as a team coach. It’s meant to complement Humphrey’s other books, TSPSM–Leading a Development Team and PSPSM: A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers. Together, the three works offer a rich resource for improving your software development capabilities.




INSPIRED


Book Description

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.




Software Development for Small Teams


Book Description

I highly recommend this book for anyone who's ever tried to implement RUP on a small project. Pollice and company have demystified and effectively scaled the process while ensuring that its essence hasn't been compromised. A must-have for any RUPster's library! Chris Soskin, Process Engineering Consultant, Toyota Motor SalesDo you want to improve the process on your next project? Perhaps you'd like to combine the best practices from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and from agile methodologies (such as Extreme Programming). If so, buy this book! Software Development for Small Teams describes an entire software development project, from the initial customer contact through delivery of the software. Through a case study, it describes how one small, distributed team designed and applied a successful process. But this is not a perfect case study. The story includes what worked and what didn't, and describes how the team might change its process for the next project. The authors encourage you to assess their results and to use the lessons learned on your next project. Key topics covered include: Achieving a balance between people, process, and tools; recognizing that software develo




Agile Software Requirements


Book Description

“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.” –From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments. Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.




Team Topologies


Book Description

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. 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.