Management Books

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David Anderson
  The book provides specific and useful guidance to those attempting to adopt kanban management in software development. The books is very well written and presents the material in a very easy to digest manner. It is so packed with information it is very difficult to mine even a significant portion of the value in one read. The organization allows for easy reference as you need to focus on any specific topic to find that topic and get an excellent review in minutes.

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
  

• Out of the Crisis: by W. Edwards Deming
  A classic but not an easy book to read. Packed with good ideas that still have great merit. New paperback printing (2000).

Management Articles

• Summing it all up by Hemal Kuntawala
  "So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice. ... Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."

• The Achilles’ Heel of Agile by Jurgen Appelo
  "In the case of shared resources, whether it concerns money, space, or system administrators, someone outside of the development teams must keep an eye on long-term sustainability instead of short-term gains by individual teams. The Tragedy of the Commons is the Achilles’ heel of Agile. It takes management to protect that heel, in order to prevent teams from depleting resources, and crippling the organization."

• Kanban Systems by James Shore
  "In the field, I've seen Kanban work best in chaotic environments where upcoming features don't have much in common. I don't think it's a coincidence that the initial examples of Kanban come from those sorts of environments. David Anderson's team was...

• Demystifying the Product Owner
  "This usually requires the product owner to lead product discovery, to help identify and describe requirements, and to ensure that the product backlog is ready for the next sprint planning meeting. It also means that the product owner has to engage in product planning, visioning and product road mapping, decide what functionality is provided by a release, carry out release planning, and answer questions from the team, review work results, and collaborate with customers, users and other stakeholders."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."

• You can’t be Agile in Maintenance?
  "Agile development naturally leads into maintenance – the goal of incremental Agile development is to get working software out to customers as soon as possible, and get customers using it. At some point, when customers are relying on the software to get real business done and need support and help to keep the system running, teams cross from development over to maintenance. But there’s no reason for Agile development teams to fundamentally change the way that they work when this happens."

• Why I Run a Flat Company by Jason Fried
  "At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider 'vertical' ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management."

• If The Only Tool You Have is a Hammer
  "Eventually my journey in software and testing as extended into areas like Agile and particularly Lean. This gave even sharper context to the concept that there is no 'right way' to do something, only slightly better or worse ways and more often than not the distinction is unclear. Nowadays it causes me almost physical pain when someone refers to 'Best Practice' and I often have to restrain myself from physical violence when someone says “We tried that once, and it didn’t work.'"

• Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it
  by Jorge Aranda, Steve Easterbrook, and Greg Wilson "This case study found evidence that small software companies have a number of characteristics that distinguish their requirements processes from those of large corporations. These findings challenge many of the common assumptions underlying requirements engineering research. The findings lead us to offer the following recommendations for the requirements engineering research community: State the context: Proposed requirements techniques may be ideal for certain contexts, and unhelpful for others. It is important to understand and to state the contexts in which a technique provides the greatest benefit to its users. Connect RE research to business and social concerns: Requirements practices in small companies are closely tied to culture and business strategy..."

• Building a Great Software Development Team by John Hunter
  "Passion for the right things, based on what we aimed to be, mattered a great deal. That took the form of being passionate about the user experience, being passionate about good software development practices, being passionate about good software itself, being passionate about treating each other with respect, being passionate about learning and improving. I think there were several other important factors, such as: the skill to turn a passion for good software into actual good software..."

• Lean Programming - part 2 of 2 by Mary Poppendieck
  "Total Quality Management still rings true for software." Not a perfect representation of Deming's ideas (in our opinion) but an example of Deming's ideas continuing to spark interest.

• Introduction to Planning Poker by Damon Poole
  "One of the biggest benefits of Planning Poker is the sense of team that it creates. The whole team is participating in the estimation. This creates a greater sense of team ownership and team responsibility for each story. Another major benefit of planning...

• Scrum-ban by Corey Ladas
  Great article on lean software development ideas: "One simple technique that brings us much closer to our kanban definition is to set a multitasking limit for individuals. You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work

• Adding Customer Value in Development at Xerox
  "Business901 Podcast featured Patrick Waara talking about Xerox’s use of Agile techniques... Our conversation originally was designed to discuss swarming and Lean problem solving. However we ventured off into the subject of how Lean, Six Sigma and Agile all work under the same umbrella"

• Lean Programming - part 1 of 2 by Mary Poppendieck
  "Assembly-line production techniques apply to software, too."

• IT the Toyota way
  "The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It's looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development -- where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer -- Toyota has adopted an agile process."

• Hiring for an Agile Team, 4 Reasons to Up Your Hiring Game by Esther Derby
  "In agile teams, people collaborate, negotiate, make trade-offs, handle conflicts. These interactions require a high level of interpersonal skill and emotional intelligence... People on agile teams need an exceptional ability to learn and apply that learning–both in growing 'generalizing specialist' skills and in improving team processes..."

• Actionable Metrics at Siemens Health Services
  "This case study details how a shift from traditional agile metrics (Story Points, Velocity) to actionable flow metrics (Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Throughput) reduced Cycle Times, increased quality, and increased overall predictability at Siemens Health Services. Moving to a continuous flow model augmented Siemens’ agility and explains how predictability is a systemic behavior that one has to manage by understanding and acting in accordance with the assumptions of Little’s Law and the impacts of resource utilization."

• You are Solving the Wrong Problem
  "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. ... When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

• Metrics and Software Development by John Hunter
  "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..."

• The Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck
  "In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning

• The Lean Influencer’s Mantra by Siraj Sirajuddin
  Video presentation on leading change to adopt lean thinking.

• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings by Jason Yip
  "It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity. ... Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract
  "We need to get back one more time to the point where we changed fixed scope into fixed budget. The 300 story points from the previous examples allows us to exchange the contents of the initial user story list. This is one of the most important aspects that we want to achieve with a fixed price contract done the agile way. Agile embraces change, and what we want to do is to streamline change management within the fixed price contract."

• Why the retrospective is not a lessons learned meeting
  "Just real, useful, insightful and timely agreements about what we're doing NOW to be even better than we were last time. That's the retrospective."

• Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems?
  "Testers who find problems successfully can link tests, test activities, and test results to the mission. They’re far more concerned about the quality of the information they provide than the quantity... Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Agile Software Development Made Easy! by Kelly Waters
  Blog by Kelly Waters agile development and agile project management.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Hemal, Developer in Test by Hemal Kuntawala
  "I'm a test-developer enhancing testing practices using kanban and lean principles. ... I'm keen to see more development teams, agile-adopters or not, move away from the end-of-cycle testing model and embrace true quality assurance by testing throughout the production line."

• Visual Management Blog
  Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue, from Argentina. The goal of the blog is to create a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management (the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work) applied to agile teams and agile project management.

• Customer Oriented Software Development
  "This blog contains thoughts, ideas, and tips about modern and efficient software development methods." By Henrik Larsson.

• Agile Six Sigma
  "I'm going to use this blog to share and capture ideas on quality - with a primary focus on application of Lean Six Sigma in a Technology setting."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Agile Blog
  The Agile Blog provides advice and resources for people actively looking to advance their Agile practices by Rally.

• Agile Management Blog by David Anderson
  

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
  By the author of the very popular book: Lean Startup.

• Agile consulting
  Insights on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Flow by Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui.

• Dennis Stevens
  Blog on agile software development.

• Leading Agile by Mike Cottmeyer
  

• Kanban Chronicle
  Purpose: To provide insight by sharing our experiences in adopting Kanban. Why: When we started, we found that the real examples were the most useful. We would like to add to that body of knowledge. We also wanted to share with our colleagues at work. Our aim: To provide a full lifecycle example from as many perspectives as possible... Why did we choose Kanban, what we read first, what we started with, how we adapted, what worked. by Andrew Walker

• Benjamin Mitchell's Blog by Benjamin Mitchell
  "I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.