Are you an architect? Scrum Master? team leader? project manager? If you are any of these, you will find that leadership, done right, is a very tough job. This book deals with the hard parts. Not with tools, but with people. Here is the manifesto that drives this book: For us as team leaders, the goal and the way we measure our work is the overall growth in skills of self-organization and self-maintenance in each member of our team and the team as a whole. To that end: We accept that the team's needs from us change continuously based on their skills for handling the current reality of work, so we embrace a continuously changing leadership style over a one-style-fits-all leadership approach. We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always get better, so: * We create slack time for the team to learn and be challenged. * We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe. * We embrace fear and discomfort while learning new skills over keeping people within their comfort zone. * We embrace experimentation as a constant practice over maintaining the status quo: * With people * With tools * With processes * With the environment * We believe our core practice is leading people, not wielding machines, so: * We embrace spending more time with our team than in meetings. * We embrace treating software problems as people problems. * We learn people skills and communication techniques. About the notes The second part of this book allows a peek into the minds of some of the best leaders, consultants, and managers as they give advice to a new team leader. Hear from Johanna Rothman, Kevlin Henney, Dan North, Uncle Bob Martin, and many others about the one thing they would like to teach you if you ever become a team leader, Scrum Master, project manager, or architect.

The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about; a variant of the well known ""telephone game,"" where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion. Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress. This book takes a look at some of those ""ground truths"" the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the ""software crisis""; the cost-of-change curve; the ""cone of uncertainty""; and more. It assesses the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas - and confronts the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

1 Jean Claude Derniame Software process technology is an emerging and strategic area that has already reached a reasonable degree of maturity, delivering products and significant industrial expe riences. This technology aims at supporting the software production process by pro viding the means to model, analyse, improve, measure, and whenever it is reasonable and convenient, to automate software production activities. In recent years, this tech nology has proved to be effective in the support of many business activities not directly related to software production, but relying heavily on the concept of process (i. e. all the applications traditionally associated with workflow management). This book concentrates on the core technology of software processes, its principles and concepts as well as the technical aspect of software process support. The contributions to this book are the collective work of the Promoter 2 European Working Group. This grouping of 13 academic and 3 industrial partners is the suc cessor of Promoter, a working group responsible for creating a European software process community. Promoter 2 aims at exploiting this emerging community to collec tively develop remaining open issues, to coordinate activities and to assist in the dis semination of results. The title “Software Process Modelling and Technology” [Fink94] was produced during Promoter 1. Being “project based”, it presented the main findings and proposals of the different projects then being undertaken by the partners.