Part I. People

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

People

WHEN WE STARTED WORKING ON BEAUTIFUL TEAMS BACK IN LATE 2007, WE THOUGHT WE HAD A pretty good idea of where the book would go. We're techie people: we've implemented lots of practices, done lots of software projects, and seen things get better over time as we did it. We've seen our own teams improve, we've learned from our mistakes over time, and we thought we had a handle on what makes a team work.

So, we thought we'd sit down with a bunch of people who felt the way we did, write down some insightful tricks of the trade and pearls of wisdom, and everyone would be happy.

As it turns out, we were in for a surprise.

Now, we weren't exactly wrong or even misguided when we started working on this project. Results do speak for themselves, and we'd gotten good results. One of the things that made us feel quite confident about our reasonably complete understanding of what makes a good team work is that we'd read plenty other people who agreed with us.

One thing that we both agreed on when we started this project was that a good team has to have a focus on the technical skills of the people on the team. So, when we started recruiting authors and looking through their writing, we expected a lot of stories about how to make sure your team is technically capable: recruiting and hiring the right people, finding ...

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