Acknowledgments

A lot of people have contributed to this book, directly or indirectly.

Technically, it builds on the work of Michael C. Feathers, Martin Fowler, Robert C. Martin, Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Joshua Kerievsky, to mention a few. The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” feels very appropriate when we think about how our ideas about development came to us.

We’d like to give a big thanks to our colleagues, friends, and families who supported us, and with whom we discussed the method and this book, acquiring many insights for improvements.

We’d also like to thank Laurent Bossavit for noticing the similarities between code restructuring and the pick-up-sticks game, thus eliciting the name for the method.

This book has taken many shapes. Special thanks go to the people who reviewed the book along the way and gave us great feedback on how to improve it. For the initial edition: Tobias Anderberg, Alan Baljeu, Olle Dahlström, George Dinwiddie, John Eckhardt, Steve Eckhardt, Manne Fagerlind, Thomas Gustavsson, Jakub Holý, Anders Ivarsson, Colin Jack, Torbjörn Kalin, Jan Mattsson, Luca Minudel, Staffan Nöteberg, Joakim Ohlrogge, Tom Poppendieck, Robert Postill, Måns Sandström, David Sills, Jelena Vencl-Ohlrogge, Ted M. Young, and Stefan Östergaard.

At Manning, thanks to the following reviewers: Alex Garrett, Christopher Weiss, David Madouros, David Paccoud, Ecil Teodoro, Ernesto Cárdenas Cangahuala, Jonathan Choate, Jonathan Suever, Josh Winslow, Kaleb Pederson, Mark Elston, Mark Sponsler, Paul Grebenc, Stephen Wakely, Timo Bredenoort, and Ursin Stauss.

Very special thanks to Tom Poppendieck for writing the foreword, for promoting the book, and for his excellent review work. The same thanks go to Heidi Helfand for her fantastic and relentless editing of the book in the first edition.

For the Manning edition, we’ve had great support and patience from the staff there: development editors Cynthia Kane and Frank Pohlmann, technical proofreader Deepak Vohra, production coordinator Kevin Sullivan, copyeditor Andy Carroll, proofreader Katie Tennant, and illustrator Martin Murtonen.