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




Crystal Clear


Book Description

Carefully researched over ten years and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams is a lucid and practical introduction to running a successful agile project in your organization. Each chapter illuminates a different important aspect of orchestrating agile projects. Highlights include Attention to the essential human and communication aspects of successful projects Case studies, examples, principles, strategies, techniques, and guiding properties Samples of work products from real-world projects instead of blank templates and toy problems Top strategies used by software teams that excel in delivering quality code in a timely fashion Detailed introduction to emerging best-practice techniques, such as Blitz Planning, Project 360o, and the essential Reflection Workshop Question-and-answer with the author about how he arrived at these recommendations, including where they fit with CMMI, ISO, RUP, XP, and other methodologies A detailed case study, including an ISO auditor's analysis of the project Perhaps the most important contribution this book offers is the Seven Properties of Successful Projects. The author has studied successful agile projects and identified common traits they share. These properties lead your project to success; conversely, their absence endangers your project.




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.




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




Continuous Delivery


Book Description

Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award! Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours— sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the “deployment pipeline,” an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the “ecosystem” needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes • Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software • Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels • Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations • Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams • Implementing an effective configuration management strategy • Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation • Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements • Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases • Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies • Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you’re a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever—so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.




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.




The Nature of Software Development


Book Description

You need to get value from your software project. You need it "free, now, and perfect." We can't get you there, but we can help you get to "cheaper, sooner, and better." This book leads you from the desire for value down to the specific activities that help good Agile projects deliver better software sooner, and at a lower cost. Using simple sketches and a few words, the author invites you to follow his path of learning and understanding from a half century of software development and from his engagement with Agile methods from their very beginning. The book describes software development, starting from our natural desire to get something of value. Each topic is described with a picture and a few paragraphs. You're invited to think about each topic; to take it in. You'll think about how each step into the process leads to the next. You'll begin to see why Agile methods ask for what they do, and you'll learn why a shallow implementation of Agile can lead to only limited improvement. This is not a detailed map, nor a step-by-step set of instructions for building the perfect project. There is no map or instructions that will do that for you. You need to build your own project, making it a bit more perfect every day. To do that effectively, you need to build up an understanding of the whole process. This book points out the milestones on your journey of understanding the nature of software development done well. It takes you to a location, describes it briefly, and leaves you to explore and fill in your own understanding. What You Need: You'll need your Standard Issue Brain, a bit of curiosity, and a desire to build your own understanding rather than have someone else's detailed ideas poured into your head.




The Art of Agile Development


Book Description

For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.




Modern Software Engineering


Book Description

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues. Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success. Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment. Clarify what you're trying to accomplish Choose your tools based on sensible criteria Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code" Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism Stay in control as systems grow more complex Achieve rigor without too much rigidity Learn from history and experience Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




Outside-in Software Development


Book Description

"Outside-in thinking complements any approach your teams may be taking to the actual implementation of software, but it changes how you measure success. A successful outside-in team does a lot of learning and not much speculation." —Tom Poppendieck Build Software That Delivers Maximum Business Value to Every Key Stakeholder Imagine your ideal development project. It will deliver exactly what your clients need. It will achieve broad, rapid, enthusiastic adoption. And it will be designed and built by a productive, high-morale team of expert software professionals. Using this book's breakthrough "outside-in" approach to software development, your next project can be that ideal project. In Outside-in Software Development, two of IBM's most respected software leaders, Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer, show you how to identify the stakeholders who'll determine your project's real value, shape every decision around their real needs, and deliver software that achieves broad, rapid, enthusiastic adoption. The authors present an end-to-end framework and practical implementation techniques any development team can quickly benefit from, regardless of project type or scope. Using their proven approach, you can improve the effectiveness of every client conversation, define priorities with greater visibility and clarity, and make sure all your code delivers maximum business value. Coverage includes Understanding your stakeholders and the organizational and business context they operate in Clarifying the short- and long-term stakeholder goals your project will satisfy More effectively mapping project expectations to outcomes Building more "consumable" software: systems that are easier to deploy, use, and support Continuously enhancing alignment with stakeholder goals Helping stakeholders manage ongoing change long after you've delivered your product Mastering the leadership techniques needed to drive outside-in development