Hiring a person for your team is the single most important decision you can make. It has long-lasting impact, whether you are the manager or a team member. Would you like to learn to hire great people? Not sure how? You need this book. Great geeks are not the same as skill-based staff. You need to analyze your culture, determine your problems, define the essentials you need in a candidate, and then you’re off and running. Great geeks adapt their knowledge to your context. One developer or technical manager is not interchangeable with another. Hiring Geeks That Fit takes the guesswork and cost out of hiring.

You think agile techniques might be for you, but your projects and organization are unique. An "out-of-the-box" agile approach won't work. Instead, unite agile and lean principles for your project. See how to design a custom approach, reap the benefits of collaboration, and deliver value. For project managers who want to use agile techniques, managers who want to start, and technical leaders who want to know more and succeed, this book is your first step toward agile project success. You've tried to use an off-the-shelf approach to agile techniques, and it's not working. Instead of a standard method or framework, work from agile and lean principles to design your own agile approach in a way that works for you. Build collaborative, cross-functional teams. See how small batch sizes and frequent delivery create an environment of trust and transparency between the team, management, and customers. Learn about the interpersonal skills that help agile teams work together so well. In addition to seeing work and knowing what "done" means, you'll see examples of many possible team-based measurements. Look at tools you can use for status reporting, and how to use those measurements to help your managers understand what agile techniques buy them. Recognize the traps that prevent agile principles from working in too many organizations, and what to do about those traps. Use agile techniques for workgroups, and see what managers can do to create and nurture an agile culture. You might be surprised at how few meetings and rituals you need to still work in an agile way. Johanna's signature frankness and humor will get you on the right track to design your agile project to succeed. What You Need:No technical expertise or experience needed, just a desire to know more about how you might use agile in your project.

Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin pioneered the agile testing discipline with their previous work, Agile Testing. Now, in More Agile Testing, they reflect on all they’ve learned since. They address crucial emerging issues, share evolved agile practices, and cover key issues agile testers have asked to learn more about. Packed with new examples from real teams, this insightful guide offers detailed information about adapting agile testing for your environment; learning from experience and continually improving your test processes; scaling agile testing across teams; and overcoming the pitfalls of automated testing. You’ll find brand-new coverage of agile testing for the enterprise, distributed teams, mobile/embedded systems, regulated environments, data warehouse/BI systems, and DevOps practices. You’ll come away understanding • How to clarify testing activities within the team • Ways to collaborate with business experts to identify valuable features and deliver the right capabilities • How to design automated tests for superior reliability and easier maintenance • How agile team members can improve and expand their testing skills • How to plan “just enough,” balancing small increments with larger feature sets and the entire system • How to use testing to identify and mitigate risks associated with your current agile processes and to prevent defects • How to address challenges within your product or organizational context • How to perform exploratory testing using “personas” and “tours” • Exploratory testing approaches that engage the whole team, using test charters with session- and thread-based techniques • How to bring new agile testers up to speed quickly–without overwhelming them The eBook edition of More Agile Testing also is available as part of a two-eBook collection, The Agile Testing Collection (9780134190624).

Create Thriving, High-Performing Teams and Organizations with Scrumban Scrumban allows you to use Kanban as a catalyst for increasingly valuable changes to your existing software development processes, amplifying and expanding upon Scrum’s benefits. Now, there’s a definitive guide to Scrumban that explains what it is (and isn’t), how and why it works, and how to use it to improve both team and organizational performance. Comprehensive, coherent, and practical, The Scrumban [R]Evolution will help you incrementally apply proven Lean/Agile principles to get what matters most: pragmatic, bottom-line results. Pioneering Scrumban coach Ajay Reddy clarifies Scrumban’s core concepts and principles, and illuminates their application through real-life examples. He takes you from the absolute basics through sustainable adoption, and from choosing metrics to advanced forecasting and adaptive management. Whatever your role in the organization, this essential guide liberates you to tailor Kanban systems based on your unique challenges–and to solve delivery problems and improvement stagnation you haven’t been able to solve with Scrum alone. Discover how Scrumban can help you reignite stalled Agile initiatives Clarify crucial relationships between purpose, values, and performance Quickly develop shared understanding in and across teams Use Scrumban to better manage Product Owner/Customer expectations Improve the rollout of Scrum in any team using Scrumban Use Scrumban and let real improvements spread with least resistance Use the right metrics to gain insight, track progress, and improve forecasting Take advantage of Scrumban’s advanced capabilities as you gain experience Develop leaders to successfully guide your Agile initiatives Integrate modeling to reliably refine your forecasting and decision-making

You have too many projects, and firefighting and multitasking are keeping you from finishing any of them. You need to manage your project portfolio. This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. See how to tie your work to your organization's mission and show your managers, your board, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. Picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be. All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster. The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization. With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.

If you have trouble estimating cost or schedule for your projects, you are not alone. The question is this: who wants the estimate and why? The definition of estimate is “guess.” But too often, the people who want estimates want commitments. Instead of a commitment, you can apply practical and pragmatic approaches to developing estimates and then meet your commitments. You can provide your managers the information they want and that you can live with. Learn how to use different words for your estimates and how to report your estimate that includes uncertainty. Learn who should—and should not—estimate. Learn how to update your estimate when you know more about your project. Regain estimation sanity. Learn practical and pragmatic ways to estimate schedule or cost for your projects.

A Comprehensive Collection of Agile Testing Best Practices: Two Definitive Guides from Leading Pioneers Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin haven’t just pioneered agile testing, they have also written two of the field’s most valuable guidebooks. Now, you can get both guides in one indispensable eBook collection: today’s must-have resource for all agile testers, teams, managers, and customers. Combining comprehensive best practices and wisdom contained in these two titles, The Agile Testing Collection will help you adapt agile testing to your environment, systematically improve your skills and processes, and strengthen engagement across your entire development team. The first title, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, defines the agile testing discipline and roles, and helps you choose, organize, and use the tools that will help you the most. Writing from the tester’s viewpoint, Gregory and Crispin chronicle an entire agile software development iteration, and identify and explain seven key success factors of agile testing. The second title, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, addresses crucial emerging issues, shares evolved practices, and covers key issues that delivery teams want to learn more about. It offers powerful new insights into continuous improvement, scaling agile testing across teams and the enterprise, overcoming pitfalls of automation, testing in regulated environments, integrating DevOps practices, and testing mobile/embedded and business intelligence systems. The Agile Testing Collection will help you do all this and much more. Customize agile testing processes to your needs, and successfully transition to them Organize agile teams, clarify roles, hire new testers, and quickly bring them up to speed Engage testers in agile development, and help agile team members improve their testing skills Use tests and collaborate with business experts to plan features and guide development Design automated tests for superior reliability and easier maintenance Plan “just enough,” balancing small increments with larger feature sets and the entire system Test to identify and mitigate risks, and prevent future defects Perform exploratory testing using personas, tours, and test charters with session- and thread-based techniques Help testers, developers, and operations experts collaborate on shortening feedback cycles with continuous integration and delivery Both guides in this collection are thoroughly grounded in the authors’ extensive experience, and supported by examples from actual projects. Now, with both books integrated into a single, easily searchable, and cross-linked eBook, you can learn from their experience even more easily.

Does your organization value and rank projects based on estimation? Except for the shortest projects, estimation is often wrong. You don’t realize the value you planned when you wanted. How can you finish projects in time to realize their potential value? Instead of estimation, consider using cost of delay to evaluate and rank projects. Cost of delay accounts for ways projects get stuck: multitasking, other projects not releasing on time, work queuing behind experts, excessive attention to code cleanliness, and management indecision to name several. Once you know about cost of delay, you can decide what to do about it. You can stop the multitasking. You can eliminate the need for experts. You can reduce the number of projects and features in progress. You can use cost of delay to rank projects and work in your organization. Learn to use cost of delay to make better decisions for your project, program, or project portfolio.

And the GEEKS shall inherit the earth! Although it may not be good for their pasty white skin, Geeks these days are enjoying a moment in the sun. From Pop Culture to High-Tech Everything, Geeks rule and everybody else, well, drools. Drawing on his own knowledge of being a geek for almost 30 years, author Alex Langley provides essential advice for growth and survival for the modern Geek, including the top five games to play on your phone while listening to boring graduation speeches. There are also quotes and anecdotes from classic Geek gods such as Bill Gates, Sheldon Cooper, Felicia Day, "Weird" Al Yankovic and Dr. Who, that inspire all geeks to embrace not only your iPhones and Xboxes, but who you are. Let's face it, sometimes being the smartest person in the room isn't enough. And when it's not, The Geek Handbook can help. You'll discover: • Basics on social interaction, both online and off. • Fashion: just because you can wear socks and sandals doesn't mean you should. • Making friends, making dinner, making babies. • Warning signs your appliances might secretly be plotting against you. • Geeky charities that give a +1 to your Light Side score. • Geek girls: tips on interacting with or becoming one of these burgeoning beauties. So get your Geek on, and keep it on with The Geek Handbook.

Annotation In this book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams and users while trying to develop software.