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:
Tim O'Reilly gives us his thoughts on leading teams and companies, and moving the world of software forward.
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.
The cofounder of Media Molecule talks about what he learned building the hit video game LittleBigPlanet.
Bill tells the story of how a good manager can take a disparate group of people and turn them into a great team.
Programming manager and Perl contributor Andy explains what motivates developers and how they can improve their relations with their teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jennifer tells the story of her experience working on a great team with conflicting goals.
Through stories from his own career, Mike tells us about how understanding the context around a project means the difference between succeeding and failing.
This is the story of how a great team that's motivated by social responsibility can succeed against a daunting foe.
The CTO of a major defense and aerospace company tells us about how he motivates his software developers.
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.
An early agile trailblazer and signer of the Agile Manifesto, James talks about his first experience with agile methods.
Scott Berkun and Steve McConnell discuss how better development practices can lead to high-performance teams.
This is the story of one of the first successful process improvements ever done, told by a pioneer of the industry.
Peter talks about the challenges of building software that will be shot into space at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Software requirements can make or break a project, and Karl uses them to ensure success.
Alex explains how better planning and agile practices improve life at a cutting-edge company.
Karl shows how a software tool can have an enormous impact on the way a team works.
Michael tells us about his work on a security research project.
Building flight software for the Boeing 777 required a whole new set of tools to be written, which brought its own set of challenges.
One bad manager can destroy a team.
A good team can overcome even the most incredible and unforeseen challenges.
Lots of different problems can trip up a team. Scott tells us how to get past some of the biggest ones.
A new project manager faces stiff challenges when she joins her team.
An improbably great team faces obstacle after obstacle.
A team that's faced with poor management, terrible facilities, and interpersonal problems manages to stay together despite it all.
One developer can take on management when the facts are in his favor.