In this page, I’ll share some of the books I found really useful. Links are to Amazon, they will be associate links – they are nothing to get rich from, but will pay me a teensy share, and as my fellow UK residents will know: every little helps!
Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton
What Amazon has to say:
“Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?
Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.
In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.
Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.”
What I think:
I love that the book is so practical, and that you can pick and choose the right approach for your team. Absolutely worth the investment for new and established teams alike!
Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
What Amazon has to say:
“Agile Testing Condensed presents a concise, easy-to-read overview of how to succeed with testing and build a quality culture in an agile context. Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin have distilled their knowledge from two decades of agile testing to help readers understand: -How to fit testing activities into an agile cycle-Who is responsible for completing various testing activities, and when-How to get testers engaged with the rest of the agile development team-How to get everyone on a delivery team engaged in continuous testing-Ways to plan testing activities using visual models-How testing can “keep up” with short iterations or even continuous delivery-How to evaluate testing effectiveness and continually improve -How to visualize a test automation strategyThis book is a must for testers, software delivery team members, product team members, business stakeholders, managers, and executives who want to know how to build quality into their product as they move to agile methods.The authors’ first two books, Agile Testing and More Agile Testing, give detailed examples of testing challenges faced by real agile teams and describe how they were solved. This condensed book provides an overview of the agile testing practices that have proven useful in many contexts. For more details on any topics in Agile Testing Condensed, please see:Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2014″
What I think:
I have learned more about agile testing from Lisa and Janet than from any other source, both from their books and from interactions I had with them in public and semi-public forums. Both are incredibly knowledgeable, experienced quality experts with a straight forward approach that doesn’t forget the human in software development. I absolutely love and recommend their books!