Building Great Software Engineering Teams

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management “Tyler’s book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager.” —Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 “Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley—the high-functioning software team.” —Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know—Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management "Tyler's book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager." --Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 "Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley--the high-functioning software team." --Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know--Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you'll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you'll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges. Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders. Learn how to make the most of: Hiring: Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your team People management: Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Organization: Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Culture: Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Communication: Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through

Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process. As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team. Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approach Translate those goals to a verifiable Definition of Done Manage code versions for consistent and predictable modification Control separate environments for each stage in the development pipeline Automate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectations Let the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for you Automate the process of pushing code through the pipeline Define development process standards to improve consistency and simplicity Manage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to date Document only the most necessary and current knowledge

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 readers 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.

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process. As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team. Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approach Translate those goals to a verifiable Definition of Done Manage code versions for consistent and predictable modification Control separate environments for each stage in the development pipeline Automate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectations Let the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for you Automate the process of pushing code through the pipeline Define development process standards to improve consistency and simplicity Manage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to date Document only the most necessary and current knowledge

As a software engineering leader, the scope of your role is extensive. You have many competing responsibilities and priorities that need to be balanced to ensure you and your team are as effective as possible. These can include providing architectural direction, driving peer to peer collaboration, ensuring cross-team alignment, motivating teams with purpose, supporting team members' career progression, or perhaps helping remove blockers and impediments. All of these efforts work to create a specific culture within a software team that aims to improve effectiveness, engagement, and retention. This book is for software engineering leaders who are responsible for leading teams. It also dives into the unique complexity and challenges that comes with leading, aligning and supporting multiple software teams. This book aspires to provide you with helpful and reusable approaches that can be leveraged to bring about a greater level of efficiency into your role as a leader. There are many books written around leading teams or leading people, this book takes a lens of what specific practices and initiatives you should be investing your time into when leading software engineering teams. The book has been inspired by the many people I have worked with, learnings from practices I have implemented, as well as books and blogs I have read over the years. I see this is a book that leads itself to many iterations and should evolve as I discover new practices and techniques that help me improve the way I lead software teams. Regardless of the size of your software team, if you find yourself needing to better balance both the technical and people aspects of leading teams, or guidance on initiatives you could be running to improve team alignment, effectiveness and engagement then this book is written for you.