Acknowledgements

I have been blessed with help and encouragement from so many people that there’s no way I can mention them all here. If I don’t mention your name, it’s not an indication that I don’t value your influence. It’s a matter of time and space and my current attention focus.

First, I want to acknowledge the influence of Jerry (Gerald M.) Weinberg, who introduced me to the work of Virginia Satir. Foolishly, I did not read Satir in college, even though a couple of friends were raving about Peoplemaking. Had I done so, I might have learned earlier what I now know, and gone even further by now. I also thank Jerry for his book, Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, the method I used to start this book. And for pushing me to go further whenever I started to settle into a new comfort zone. Jerry, I wish you were here so that I could show you my book.

I’m also grateful to Esther Derby for her support and encouragement over a great many years, and especially as I wrote this book. Esther has long been my greatest mentor, believing in me when I failed to believe in myself.

Thanks also to Dale Emery, the best question-asker I’ve ever met, for encouraging me to attend Amplifying Your Effectiveness, where I met Jerry Weinberg and Esther Derby. I also thank Dale for his patient feedback on the story elements. I used as much of that feedback as my writing skill could support.

I am grateful for many conversations, both online and in person, that have helped me formulate and refine my ideas. Some of these conversations were in particular reference to this book as I was writing it. Thanks to Heather Oppenheimer for a delightful conversation on various aspects affecting an estimate. I certainly would have missed some of these on my own. Thanks to David Schmaltz & John Maxwell for discussions on the nature of governance. Thanks to Sharon Marsh Roberts for sharing a long and inspiring tale of accommodating a change in the accounting laws. I ultimately didn’t end up using that story in the book, but it inspired some of the stories I did use. Thanks to Troy Magennis for a sanity check on model-based estimation. And also thanks, Troy, for your inspiring keynote at the Agile 2018 Conference. That keynote reassured me that I was on the right track. Thanks to Chet Hendrickson, Ron Jeffries, and Kent Beck for telling me their memories of the C3 project. Of course, if it wasn’t for the mentions of that project getting in my way when I was researching design patterns at the Portland Pattern Repository, I might not have taken the path to my immersion in agile software development at all. But when I looked at Extreme Programming instead of trying to look around it, mostly it just made sense to me.

Thanks to the technical reviewers who took the time to read a draft of this book and send comments back to me and my editor. These include: Keith Braithwaite, Mark Chu-Carroll, John Cutler, Josef Finsel, Liz Keogh, Evan Leybourn, Dave Nicolette, Tim Ottinger, Johanna Rothman, Joshua Smith, James Thomas, and Gil Zilberfeld. Even the comments that annoyed me helped me to improve this book.

Thanks to Jeff Langr for enticing me to work with The Pragmatic Programmers. He made it deceptively easy to take that fateful step.

A great deal of thanks goes to my editor, Adaobi Obi Tulton. When I sent a complete manuscript (which is not the way Pragmatic suggests working) to Adaobi at the beginning of our collaboration, her response was that she liked my material, but we needed to rewrite the Table of Contents. As much as I was dismayed by the prospect of yet another restructuring and rewrite, I knew she was right. She has pushed me gently and firmly, and the book is much better for it. I hope that she is as proud of it as I am. I’m not ready to write another book, but if I ever am, I would work with Adaobi again in a heartbeat.

Thanks to Lucy (the cat) for helping me type. She was always willing to walk on the keyboard when I seemed to be stuck. Thanks to Elliot (the other cat) for helping me find the mouse pointer on the screen. Even with his poor eyesight he could spot it and try to pin it down with his paw.

And most importantly, thanks to my wife, Gail, not only for her support while writing this book, but for her love and partnership for more than half my life. She has led me on adventures I never would have considered. She has taught me to dream big, to focus on value rather than cost, and to try things without knowing how they’ll work out. And during the writing of this book, she has endured my preoccupation with the computer and my shouts at Lucy when she steps on the power button to get my attention. Thank you, Love.

Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.