Learning Agile

Preface

Acknowledgments

We wrote this book to help you learn agile—but we didn’t do it alone. First and foremost, we want to thank our fantastic editor, Mary Treseler. She championed this project from the day we first discussed it with her in an Indian restaurant in downtown Manhattan all the way through to the finished book that you’re reading today. She’s been an important part of everything we’ve done with O’Reilly, and we couldn’t have done this without her.

We’d also like to thank other friends at O’Reilly, without whom this would not be possible: Mike Hendrickson, Laurie Petrycki, Tim O’Reilly, Ally MacDonald, Andy Oram, Nicole Shelby, and especially Marsee Henon, Sara Peyton, Kathryn Barrett, and all of the fantastic press and PR folks in Sebastopol.

We want to thank Mike Cohn for his wonderful foreword, as well as the really good advice he’s given us over the years. We also want to thank him for his great books, because we learned a lot from them! We’d also like to thank David Anderson for giving us some really excellent feedback on Chapters 8 and 9. We want to thank Grady Booch, Scott Ambler, James Grenning, Scott Berkun, Steve McConnell, Karl Wiegers, Johanna Rothman, Patricia Ensworth, Tommy Tarka, Keoki Andrus, Neil Siegel, Karl Fogel, and Auke Jilderda for giving us some really good material and input over the years, especially in Beautiful Teams—and especially Barry Boehm, not only for contributing a really fantastic story to that book, but more importantly for laying the intellectual groundwork that much of agile is built on. And we want to thank Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Ron Jeffries, Tom Poppendieck, Mary Poppendieck, Lyssa Adkins, and Jim Highsmith for their groundbreaking work in agile. We literally would not have been able to write this book without them.

We also want to thank all of our technical reviewers for their excellent feedback and thorough review: Faisal Jawdat, Adam Reeve, Anjanette Randolph, Samuel Weiler, Dave Prior, Randy DeFauw, Todd Webb, Michael DeWitt, and Paul Ellarby.

And finally, we’d like to thank the hundreds of software team members who have been kind enough to talk to us about their problems, solutions, stories, and experiences over the years.

Andrew would like to thank Lisa Kellner. He’d also like to thank everyone in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon who helped him learn some really important ideas, especially Bob Harper, Mark Stehlik, and Randy Bryant. He’d like to thank Tony Visconti, who’s been a true mentor and a friend over the years. He’d like to thank his friends Sara Landeau, Greg Gassman, Juline Koken, Kristeen Young, and Casey Dunmore—thinking back, it’s kind of amazing how much he’s learned about teamwork from these great musicians. He’d also like to thank some really fantastic teammates he’s had over his career, including Dan Faltyn, Ned Robinson, Debra Herschmann, Mary Gensheimer, Lana Sze, Warren Pearson, Bill DiPierre, Jonathan Weinberg, and Irene O’Brien. And last but not least, he’d like to thank the two best software teams he’s ever worked with, especially Mark Denovich, Eric Renkey, and Chris Winters from Optiron, and Mike Hickin, Nick Lai, Sunanda Bera, and Rituraj Deb Nath from Bank of America.

Jenny would like to thank Nisha Sondhe. She’d also like to thank Christopher Wenger, Brian Romeo, LaToya Jordan, Mazz Swift, Rekha Malhotra, Courtney Nelson, Anjanette Randolph, Shona McCarthy, Ethan Hill, Yeidy Rodriguez, Kyle Mosier, Achinta McDaniel, Jaikaran Sawhny, and Kit Cole for all of their support, laughter, and shenanigans. She’d like to thank her family for their patience and encouragement during the nearly three years this book was under construction. She’d like to thank Tanya and Dilan Desai for their support and help. Finally, she’d like to thank the many colleagues she’s learned from over the years. There are too many people who deserve thanks to list them all, but here are a few: Joe Madia, Paul Oakes, Jonathan Weinberg, Bianka Buschbeck, Thor List, Oleg Fishel, Brian Duperrouzel, Dave Murdock, Flora Chen, Danny Wunder, David San Filippo, and Rasko Ristic.

Safari® Books Online

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business.

Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training.

Safari Books Online offers a range of product mixes and pricing programs for organizations, government agencies, and individuals. Subscribers have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers like O’Reilly Media, Prentice Hall Professional, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Focal Press, Cisco Press, John Wiley & Sons, Syngress, Morgan Kaufmann, IBM Redbooks, Packt, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, McGraw-Hill, Jones & Bartlett, Course Technology, and dozens more. For more information about Safari Books Online, please visit us online.

How to Contact Us

Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:

• O’Reilly Media, Inc.
• 1005 Gravenstein Highway North
• Sebastopol, CA 95472
• 800-998-9938 (in the United States or Canada)
• 707-829-0515 (international or local)
• 707-829-0104 (fax)

We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at http://bit.ly/learning-agile.

To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to [e-mail].

For more information about our books, courses, conferences, and news, see our website at http://www.oreilly.com.

Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia

Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia