Running Agile

A Practitioner's View To Lean & Agile

Posts Tagged ‘book’

Oye! Oye! New poppendieck book now available

Posted by Christophe on October 30, 2009

Mary and Tom Poppendieck third book just came out!

As the usage of lean in software development matures, expect specific and actionable ideas.

If you can’t wait to get the book, just buy it now.

Leading Lean Software Development

If you have any ounce of patience, you can read the table of content, and the book sysnopsis.

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization—and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies.

The Poppendiecks organize this book around the crucial concept of frames, the unspoken mental constructs that shape our perspectives and control our behavior in ways we rarely notice. For software leaders and team members, some frames lead to long-term failure, while others offer a strong foundation for success. Drawing on decades of experience, the authors present twenty-four frames that offer a coherent, complete framework for leading lean software development. You’ll discover powerful new ways to act as competency leader, product champion, improvement mentor, front-line leader, and even visionary.

  • Systems thinking: focusing on customers, bringing predictability to demand, and revamping policies that cause inefficiency
  • Technical excellence: implementing low-dependency architectures, TDD, and evolutionary development processes, and promoting deeper developer expertise
  • Reliable delivery: managing your biggest risks more effectively, and optimizing both workflow and schedules
  • Relentless improvement: seeing problems, solving problems, sharing the knowledge
  • Great people: finding and growing professionals with purpose, passion, persistence, and pride
  • Aligned leaders: getting your entire leadership team on the same page

Posted in Books, Lean, Mary Poppendieck | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Bill Gates, The Beetles and Mozart

Posted by Christophe on March 10, 2009

What do Bill Gates, The Beetles and Mozart have in common?

They all super achieved.

Why?

Because they all were born geniuses?

Not necessarily.

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, exposes in his newly released book Outliers: The Story of Success a very different reality.

outliers

According to Gladwell, extraordinary success is related to

  • a variety of social aspects – the period someone is born into, the surrounding culture, availability of opportunities, connections and luck
  • the sheer amount of work in a field done at an early age  – 10,000 concentrated hours

The bottom line is that practice, practice, practice, and more practice is necessary for high performance.

As a leader, are you creating a framework for repeat practice?

As a team member, are you relentlessly paying your 10,000 hour dues?

dilbert-hard-work

Posted in Books, Dilbert, Jokes | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Sustainability Role Models

Posted by Christophe on March 3, 2009

So an agile team strives to work at a sutainable pace.

Great.

It’s even in the agile manifesto -well, on the second page:
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

But what about the managers? and the executive layer?

According to a new book, Elsewhere USA (Dalton Conley), things have dramatically changed in the past few decades:

  • In the 60s, professional success translated into increased wealth and more leisure time for people and their family
  • Today, professional success doesn’t. Instead, people end up working more hours and feel higher  anxiety

elsewhere-usa-book

Excerpt from the book description:

Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles–worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client–all in the same instant?

Conley shows that the higher the position, the more people feel their work is intangible, pushing them to work longer and longer hours, everywhere, all the time. He doesn’t condemned the practice, but rather tell people to accept and live with it.

So here’s a question:

Given that

  • employees do what the boss does -a simple mimic mechanism or a conscious action to avoid being in trouble
  • over utilized people produce less than people that have some
  • all systemic conflicts are the result of unexamined assumptions (root causes)
  • overall throughput can be only be increased by increasing the throughput at the bottleneck process

Are executives really helping their company when working 24/7?

dilbert-spare-time

Posted in Books, Dilbert, Leadership, Productivity, Theory of Constraints | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Agile Testing – Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

Posted by Christophe on February 21, 2009

Who hasn’t heard that agile testers are different?

They work upfront, hand in hand with the developers, are information radiator to the business, create automated testing frameworks, do exploratory testing, help getting stories done-done, are change agents etc. Right?

But how do you get there? And where is “there” anyway?

That’s what Lisa Cripsin and Janet Gregory are answering in their newly released book “Agile Testing – A practical guide for testers and agile teams“.

In this book, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester’s role with examples from real agile teams (collected from over 40 interviews with agile personalities). They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors
of agile testing.

Readers will come away from this book understanding

  • How to get testers engaged in agile development
  • Where testers and QA managers fit on an agile team
  • What to look for when hiring an agile tester
  • How to transition from a traditional cycle to agile development
  • How to complete testing activities in short iterations
  • How to use tests to successfully guide development
  • How to overcome barriers to test automation

This book is a must for agile testers, agile teams, their managers, and their customers.

Posted in Books, Quality | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

James Shore on “The Art of Agile Development”

Posted by Christophe on May 27, 2008

In this InfoQ interview taken during the Agile 2007 conference, James Shore, a prominent figure of the Agile community, talks about the book “The Art of Agile Development” he and Shane Warden wrote. The book was not yet published at the time when the interview was made, and James offers a valuable introduction to the book touching various aspects of Agile development.

Posted in Agile2007, James Shore, Videos | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

 
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