BEAUTIFUL TEAMSWAS CONCEIVED IN LATE 2007 DURING A CHANCE MEETING IN O'REILLY EDITOR Andy Oram's office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We'd been invited to give a talk for the local PMI chapter, and we decided to take the opportunity to drop by the O'Reilly office to say "Hi" and finally put faces to some very familiar voices we'd worked with over the years. Beautiful Code had spent a few months at the top of the O'Reilly bestseller list, and the company was looking to follow up with another anthology. Since we've spent so much of our careers talking and writing about how projects work and how teams build software, the idea for Beautiful Teams basically fell out of thin air.
The original idea was just to follow up on Beautiful Code with a straightforward anthology about project management. Like all great projects, Beautiful Teams took on a life of its own. It attracted contributors of an incredibly high caliber. It became a journey for us, allowing us the opportunity to learn from some of the brightest minds in software development today. These are personal stories and experiences. Each person who contributed to this book is talking about his or her own past work life, which very few of us ever get a chance to examine. And every single contributor was happy to donate his or her time and effort without any payment whatsoever; proceeds from this book are instead being donated to PlayPumps International.
Here is a short summary of the chapters in this book and what you'll find inside:
- Chapter 1, Leadership, an Interview with Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly gives us his thoughts on leading teams and companies, and moving the world of software forward.
- Chapter 2, Why Ugly Teams Win, by Scott Berkun
Many so-called beautiful teams were never described in those words by the people on them. Scott relates his experience at Microsoft, and explains the wabi-sabi of ugly teams.
- Chapter 3, Building Video Games, an Interview with Mark Healey
The cofounder of Media Molecule talks about what he learned building the hit video game LittleBigPlanet.
- Chapter 4, Building the Perfect Team, by Bill DiPierre
Bill tells the story of how a good manager can take a disparate group of people and turn them into a great team.
- Chapter 5, What Makes Developers Tick, an Interview with Andy Lester
Programming manager and Perl contributor Andy explains what motivates developers and how they can improve their relations with their teams.
- Chapter 6, Inspiring People, an Interview with Keoki Andrus
Keoki tells us about how he has improved teams in companies such as Intuit, Microsoft, and Novell by understanding, inspiring, and guiding the people on them.
- Chapter 7, Bringing the Music Industry into the 21st Century, by Tom Tarka
This is the story of the rise and fall of MP3.com, an icon of the dot-com boom and bust, and the people who lived through it.
- Chapter 8, Inner Source, an Interview with Auke Jilderda
The inner source initiative brings open source practices and ideas to corporate teams, and Auke tells us how he implemented it, and how it affected the people on those teams.
- Chapter 9, Creating Team Cultures, an Interview with Grady Booch
It takes work to get a team to gel, especially a distributed team. Grady talks about the challenges of getting teams moving in the right direction.
- Chapter 10, Putting the "I" in Failure, by Jennifer Greene
Jennifer tells the story of her experience working on a great team with conflicting goals.
- Chapter 11, Planning, an Interview with Mike Cohn
Through stories from his own career, Mike tells us about how understanding the context around a project means the difference between succeeding and failing.
- Chapter 12, The Copyfighters Take Mordor, by Cory Doctorow
This is the story of how a great team that's motivated by social responsibility can succeed against a daunting foe.
- Chapter 13, Defending the Free World, an Interview with Neil Siegel
The CTO of a major defense and aerospace company tells us about how he motivates his software developers.
- Chapter 14, Saving Lives, an Interview with Trevor Field
The founder of PlayPumps International talks about what motivated him to leave the cushy world of advertising and dedicate his life to delivering clean drinking water to rural schools and villages in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Chapter 15, Building a Team with Collaboration and Learning, by James Grenning
An early agile trailblazer and signer of the Agile Manifesto, James talks about his first experience with agile methods.
- Chapter 16, Better Practices, an Interview with Steve McConnell
Scott Berkun and Steve McConnell discuss how better development practices can lead to high-performance teams.
- Chapter 17, Memories of TRW's Software Productivity Project, by Barry Boehm and Maria Penedo
This is the story of one of the first successful process improvements ever done, told by a pioneer of the industry.
- Chapter 18, Building Spaceships, an Interview with Peter Glück
Peter talks about the challenges of building software that will be shot into space at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- Chapter 19, Succeeding with Requirements, by Karl E. Wiegers
Software requirements can make or break a project, and Karl uses them to ensure success.
- Chapter 20, Development at Google, an Interview with Alex Martelli
Alex explains how better planning and agile practices improve life at a cutting-edge company.
- Chapter 21, Teams and Tools, by Karl Fogel
Karl shows how a software tool can have an enormous impact on the way a team works.
- Chapter 22, Research Teams, an Interview with Michael Collins
Michael tells us about his work on a security research project.
- Chapter 23, The HADS Team, by Karl Rehmer
Building flight software for the Boeing 777 required a whole new set of tools to be written, which brought its own set of challenges.
- Chapter 24, Bad Boss, by Andrew Stellman
One bad manager can destroy a team.
- Chapter 25, Welcome to the Process, by Ned Robinson
A good team can overcome even the most incredible and unforeseen challenges.
- Chapter 26, Getting Past Obstacles, an Interview with Scott Ambler
Lots of different problems can trip up a team. Scott tells us how to get past some of the biggest ones.
- Chapter 27, Speed Versus Quality, by Johanna Rothman
A new project manager faces stiff challenges when she joins her team.
- Chapter 28, Tight, Isn't It?, by Mark Denovich and Eric Renkey
An improbably great team faces obstacle after obstacle.
- Chapter 29, Inside and Outside the Box, by Patricia Ensworth
A team that's faced with poor management, terrible facilities, and interpersonal problems manages to stay together despite it all.
- Chapter 30, Compiling the Voice of a Team, by Andy Oram
One developer can take on management when the facts are in his favor.
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We'd like to thank all of the contributors who generously donated their time and effort: Tim O'Reilly, Scott Berkun, Mark Healey (and the rest of the folks at Media Molecule!), Bill DiPierre, Andy Lester, Keoki Andrus, Tommy Tarka, Auke Jilderda, Grady Booch, Mike Cohn, Cory Doctorow, Neil Siegel, James Grenning, Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, Maria Penedo, Peter Glück, Karl Wiegers, Alex Martelli, Karl Fogel, Mike Collins, Karl Rehmer, Ned Robinson, Scott Ambler, Johanna Rothman, Mark Denovich, Eric Renkey, Stan Granite, Patricia Ensworth, and Andy Oram. And we are especially grateful to Tony Visconti for taking the time to talk to us.
We want to thank Trevor Field and the rest of the great people at PlayPumps International (http://www.playpumps.org) for the wonderful work that they do, as well as for Trevor's contribution to this book. Please visit the organization's website to find out why we're donating royalties from this book to them.
Finally, once again, special thanks to Nisha Sondhe for her extraordinary photography.
Andrew Stellman started work as a programmer at a national record label after graduating from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent the first few years focusing on technical design and architecture, but found himself increasingly responsible for leading and then managing the teams he was on. Over the last decade, Andrew has led teams of programmers and managed numerous projects. He now spends his time building his own projects and helping the people around him improve the way they manage theirs.
Jennifer Greene began her software engineering career in the early 1990s at a well-known online service. She has since built and led software engineering teams in organizations spanning finance, non-profit, natural language processing and media. She has built and managed distributed software teams and worked with developers around the world to improve their practices and build better software.
Jennifer and Andrew have been working together since 1998 building software and training software teams. They initially defined the software process at the company where they were working, and have since run many successful projects together. Their projects have been focused on science and public health, and they have built software for the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the Business School (also at Columbia University), and the National Academy of Sciences. They have since branched out into commercial project management and software engineering consulting, providing training, project management, outsourced project management, and professional services to both the business and academic communities.
Their first book, Applied Software Project Management, was published by O'Reilly in 2005, and has since been adopted as a software engineering textbook at many universities worldwide. They went on two write two books in the acclaimed Head First series. Head First PMP has been recognized as one of the best PMP preparation guides available, and has been used by tens of thousands of project managers to prepare for their project management certification. Their third book, Head First C#, spent more than a year as one of O'Reilly's bestsellers and is currently one of the top-selling programming language books on the market. In addition to writing, Andrew and Jennifer speak regularly at software development, project management, and process improvement conferences around the world. Beautiful Teams is their fourth book.