Beautiful Teams

Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

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Beautiful Teams

Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

By Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Released: March 2009

Pages: 512

What's it like to work on a great software development team facing an impossible problem? How do you build an effective team? Can a group of people who don't get along still build good software? How does a team leader keep everyone on track when the stakes are high and the schedule is tight?

Beautiful Teams takes you behind the scenes with some of the most interesting teams in software engineering history. You'll learn from veteran team leaders' successes and failures, told through a series of engaging personal stories -- and interviews -- by leading programmers, architects, project managers, and thought leaders.

This book includes contributions from:

Tim O'Reilly
Scott Berkun
Mark Healey
Bill DiPierre
Andy Lester
Keoki Andrus
Tom Tarka
Auke Jilderda
Grady Booch
Jennifer Greene
Mike Cohn
Cory Doctorow
Neil Siegel
Trevor Field
James Grenning
Steve McConnell
Barry Boehm and Maria H. Penedo
Peter Gluck
Karl E. Wiegers
Alex Martelli
Karl Fogel
Michael Collins
Karl Rehmer
Andrew Stellman
Ned Robinson
Scott Ambler
Johanna Rothman
Mark Denovich and Eric Renkey
Patricia Ensworth
Andy Oram
Tony Visconti

Beautiful Teams is edited by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, veteran software engineers and project managers who have been writing bestselling books for O'Reilly since 2005, including Applied Software Project Management, Head First PMP, and Head First C#.

Chapter 1 Leadership
People
1. Chapter 2 Why Ugly Teams Win
  1. Ugly Talent
  2. Ugly As Beautiful
  3. My Wabi-Sabi Team: Internet Explorer 4.0
2. Chapter 3 Building Video Games
3. Chapter 4 Building the Perfect Team
4. Chapter 5 What Makes Developers Tick
5. Chapter 6 Inspiring People
6. Chapter 7 Bringing the Music Industry into the 21st Century: One Lawsuit at a Time
  1. A New Project, A New Team
  2. A Calculated Risk …
  3. Gentlemen, Start Your Rippers…
  4. The Final Month
  5. I Am So Smart: S-M-R-T … S-M-A-R-T
  6. Engineering Department Smokes a Collective Cigarette
  7. Intermission: The Founding of a Panda Preserve
  8. "You Realists Can Stay the Hell Out of Our Office!"
  9. Not with a Bang, But with a Whimper …
  10. Epilogue
  11. Afterword
7. Chapter 8 Inner Source
Goals
1. Chapter 9 Creating Team Cultures
2. Chapter 10 Putting the "I" in Failure
3. Chapter 11 Planning
4. Chapter 12 The Copyfighters Take Mordor
5. Chapter 13 Defending the Free World
6. Chapter 14 Saving Lives
Practices
1. Chapter 15 Building a Team with Collaboration and Learning
  1. Selling Management
  2. Getting Started
  3. Growing the Team
  4. Pressing the Envelope and the Process Police
  5. Learning
  6. Requirements Versus On-Site Customer
  7. Trouble in River City
  8. Companies Make Their Own Troubles
  9. Future Projects
  10. Collaboration Success Factors
  11. References
2. Chapter 16 Better Practices
3. Chapter 17 Memories of TRW's Software Productivity Project: A Beautiful Team, Challenged to Change the CultureEditors' note: if you've worked on a software team in the past 20 years, you have been influenced by Barry Boehm. He was one of the first people to take a systematic approach to estimating and planning software projects. And many people (including us) believe that his pioneering Spiral Model is the direct predecessor to the modern idea of iterative development.
  1. Background on the Software Productivity Project
  2. Making the Project a Reality
  3. Project Stories
  4. Conclusion
  5. References
  6. Acknowledgments
4. Chapter 18 Building Spaceships
5. Chapter 19 Succeeding with Requirements: A Drama in Three Acts
  1. The Setting
  2. The Cast
  3. Prologue: Paul Is in a Pickle
  4. Act I: Girding Our Loins
  5. Act II: Use Cases, Schmuse Cases
  6. Act III: Look Over My Shoulder
  7. Epilogue: Let's Eat!
  8. Coda: Then What Happened?
  9. Useful References
  10. Acknowledgments
6. Chapter 20 Development at Google
7. Chapter 21 Teams and Tools
  1. How Open Source Projects Work
  2. The Contribulyzer
  3. Commit Emails and Gumption Sinks
  4. They're Staying Away in Droves: A Tale of Two Translation Interfaces
  5. Conclusion
8. Chapter 22 Research Teams
9. Chapter 23 The HADS Team
  1. The Background
  2. The Initial Team
  3. Getting It Right
  4. Dealing with User Issues
  5. Epilogue
Obstacles
1. Chapter 24 Bad Boss
2. Chapter 25 Welcome to the Process: Step Inside, Step Inside, and See the Show
3. Chapter 26 Getting Past Obstacles
4. Chapter 27 Speed Versus Quality: Why Do We Need to Choose?
  1. How Did We Get Here?
  2. About the Team
  3. Becoming Part of the Team
  4. Starting Off Right
  5. Solving Problems As a Team
  6. What Code Review Looked Like
  7. Unit Tests
  8. Check-ins
  9. Builds
  10. Schedules
  11. Status Reports
  12. Go Faster Now!
  13. Looking for More Speed
  14. Losing a Week at a Time
  15. What to Do Next
  16. Retaining Integrity
  17. The Rubber Meets the Road
  18. Success at Last
  19. Epilogue
  20. References
5. Chapter 28 Tight, Isn't It?
  1. Only Pawn…in Game of Life, or "What's a Dazzling Urbanite Like You Doing in a Rustic Setting Like This?"
  2. CMM Level Subzero, or "Processes, We Don't Need No Stinking Processes!"
  3. The Brown Hole, or "I'd Say You've Had Enough"
  4. Some of These Envelopes Contain Stock Options, or "I'm Through Being Mr. Goodbar, the Time Has Come to Act and Act Quickly"
  5. The Blitz, or "Break's Over, Boys, Don't Just Lie There Gettin' a Suntan…"
  6. Our Invite to the Number Six Dance, or "What Is It That's Not Exactly Water and It Ain't Exactly Earth?"
  7. Epilogue, or "Nowhere Special…I Always Wanted to Go There"
6. Chapter 29 Inside and Outside the Box
7. Chapter 30 Compiling the Voice of a Team
  1. A Gem from the Computing Past
  2. Rewiring
  3. Coping
  4. Coding
  5. Capitulating
  6. The Break
  7. Anticipating 21st-Century Management
  8. Final Notes
Music
1. Chapter 31 Producing Music
2. Appendix Contributors

Colophon

Title:

Beautiful Teams

By:

Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Formats:

Print
Ebook
Safari Books Online

Print:

March 2009

Ebook:

March 2009

Pages:

512

Print ISBN:

978-0-596-51802-8

| ISBN 10:

0-596-51802-1

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-596-80196-0

| ISBN 10:

0-596-80196-3

Andrew Stellman

Andrew Stellman, despite being raised a New Yorker, has lived in Pittsburgh twice. The first time was when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, and then again when he and Jenny were starting their consulting business and writing their first project management book for O'Reilly. When he moved back to his hometown, his first job after college was as a programmer at EMI-Capitol Records--which actually made sense, since he went to LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts to study cello and jazz bass guitar. He and Jenny first worked together at that same financial software company, where he was managing a team of programmers. He's since managed various teams of software engineers, requirements analysts, and led process improvement efforts. Andrew keeps himself busy eating an enormous amount of string cheese and Middle Eastern desserts, playing music (but video games even more), studying taiji and aikido, having a girlfriend named Lisa, and owing a pomeranian. For more information about Andrew, Jennifer Greene, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

View Andrew Stellman's full profile page.
Jennifer Greene

Jennifer Greene, has spent the past 15 years or so building software for many different kinds of companies. She's worked for small start-ups and some huge companies along the way. She's built software test teams and helped lots of companies diagnose and deal with habitual process problems so that they could build better software. Since her start in software test and process definition, she's branched out into development management and project management. She's currently managing a big development team for a global media company and she's managed just about every aspect of software development through her career.

Jennifer founded Stellman & Greene Consulting with Andrew Stellman in 2003, initially to serve the scientific and academic community. They have worked in a wide range of industries including finance, telecommunications, media, non-profit, entertainment, natural language processing, science and academia. They do speaking engagements, provide training on development practices, manage teams, and build software. Together, they've written two highly acclaimed books on project management (Head First PMP and Applied Software Project Management), Head First C#, and most recently just finished up Beautiful Teams.

For more information about Jennifer, Andrew Stellman, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

View Jennifer Greene's full profile page.