Lean Analytics and Lean UX – Two new guides to better business and user experiences – #bookreview

Okay, how are we leaning today? Leaning in? Leaning back? Leaning to the left or right? Leaning over? Or just leaning toward chucking all “hot new” postures that supposedly help us pose ourselves for career success?

Here’s some good news. None of the above leanings are topics in two new books from O’Reilly’s popular “Lean” series, edited by Eric Ries.

Lean Analytics deals with using data to help you determine if there is a profitable need for the product or service you hope to offer with a startup business. Lean UX, meanwhile, deals with the process of designing a better user experience (UX) for a company’s apps, website or other products.  Here are short reviews of each book:

Lean Analytics
Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
(O’Reilly – hardback, Kindle)

“Entrepreneurs,” the authors state, “are particularly good at lying to themselves. Lying may even be a prerequisite for succeeding as an entrepreneur–after all, you need to convince others that something is true in the absence of good, hard evidence. You need believers to take a leap of faith with you. As an entrepreneur, you need to live in a semi-delusional state just to survive the inevitable rollercoaster ride of running your startup.”

But…you also need cold, hard data. And what you learn from that data may not mesh well with the lie you are living as you try to start a new business from scratch. Yet, it may save you from failing and wasting a lot of money.

“Your delusions,” the authors argue, “no matter how convincing, will wither under the harsh light of data. Analytics is the necessary counterweight to lying, the yin to the yang of hyperbole. Moreover, data-driven learning is the cornerstone of success in startups. It’s how you learn what’s working and iterate toward the right product and market before the money runs out.”

Lean Analytics builds on the Lean Startup process developed by Eric Ries. In today’s digital world, the authors explain, “[w]e’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how companies are built. It’s vanishingly cheap to create the first version of something. Clouds are free. Social media is free. Competitive research is free. Even billing and transactions are free.”

Taken together, these facilities mean “you can build something, measure its effect, and learn from it to build something better next time. You can iterate quickly, deciding early on if you should double down on your idea or fold and move on to the next one.”

Their 409-page book is not quick reading. But it deserves attention and study, whether you want to start a business, already have started a business, or hope to revamp and improve a business that has been in operation for some time. Lean Analytics presents many examples and case studies that illustrate how you can gather and analyze existing data, then test products or services to determine if they are something that customers actually need, want and will use.

With new data from the tests and the ability to continue testing, you can modify your product or service and focus more resources, energy, and time on improving and refining what will work best for your customers–and your bottom line.

***

Lean UX
Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden
(O’Reilly - hardback, Kindle)

“Lean UX is a collaborative process,” the two authors of this book emphasize. “It brings designers and non-designers together in co-creation. It yields ideas that are bigger than those of the individual contributors. But it’s not design-by-committee. Instead, Lean UX increases a team’s ownership over the work by providing an opportunity for all opinions to be heard much earlier in the process.”

For example, forget the notion of a web designer hiding in an office for a week or so and then emerging with what he or she insists will be a “masterpiece” as the company’s new home page.

Particularly in software development, a key aspect of Lean and Agile development theories is the notion of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). “Lean UX makes heavy use of the notion of MVP,” the two authors explain. “MVPs help test our assumptions–will this tactic achieve the desired outcome?–while minimizing the work we put into unproven ideas. The sooner we can find which features are worth investing in, the sooner we can focus our limited resources on the best solutions to our business problems. This concept is an important part of how Lean UX minimizes waste.”

The web designer’s “masterpiece” might work okay, but it also might offer costly confusions for customers and others visiting the website. Instead, Lean UX emphasizes collaboration, teamwork, testing prototypes, analyzing the results, gathering feedback from outsiders, revamping the project, testing it again–and continuing the process.

According to the writers, the most powerful tool in Lean UX is one that is basic to human beings: conversation. Indeed, conversation should be “the primary means of communication among team members.” Some of the other tools for collaboration also are basic: pencils, pens, notepads, whiteboards, blackboards, and simple paper templates that can spur discussions, opinions, and basic designs for the Minimum Viable Product and its successors, before moving the work to computers.

Lean UX is just 130 pages long. But it is rich with how-to examples, process descriptions, short case studies, clear steps, useful illustrations, and good examples that you can adapt and employ to create cheaper, faster, and better user experiences.

Si Dunn

Designing Games – A well-written, comprehensive guide to video game engineering – #bookreview

Designing Games
A Guide to Engineering Experiences
Tynan Sylvester
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

If you design video games, if you hope to become a game creator, or if you work for a company whose lifeblood is creating and maintaining successful video games, you need to read this excellent book.

 Tynan Sylvester provides a comprehensive overview of the design processes that are the heart of successful games. And he describes the day-to-day actions necessary to keep game projects on track to completion.

“A game can’t just generate any old string of events, because most events aren’t worth caring about,” Sylvester contends. He is a veteran designer who has worked on everything from independently produced games to big-studio blockbuster games. “For a game to hold attention, those events must provoke blood-pumping human emotion. When the generated events provoke pride, hilarity, awe, or terror, the game works.”

Unlike screenwriters, novelists, or choreographers, game designers do not focus on creating events, Sylvester explains. “Instead of authoring events,  we design mechanics [the rules for how a game works]. Those mechanics then generate events during play.”

In his view, “The hard part of game design is not physically implementing the game. It is inventing and refining knowledge about the design.” And successful game creation involves “inventing mechanics, fiction, art, and technology that interconnect into a powerful engine of experience.”

His 405-page book also shows why you should not try to spell out everything up front before beginning work on a new game. It is too easy to overplan, he emphasizes. But it is also easy to underplan. So you should aim for a process in the middle: iteration, “the practice of making short-range plans, implementing them, testing them, and repeating.” And that loop-like process is applied not just to the overall game. “We can iterate on a level, a tool, or an interface. On larger teams, there should be many different iteration loops running at the same time.”

According to news accounts emerging from the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, much of the video game creation business is now gravitating toward independent developers and game companies with 10 or fewer employees. And the main focus within that movement is on creating games for tablet computers and smartphones–platforms with lower barriers to entry. But powerful new video game consoles are expected to appear soon, and they likely will drive the creation of new games, as well as upgrades for some successful existing games.

Whether you work alone, in a small shop, or on intercontinental game-development teams within big companies, you can learn important insights, processes, and skills from Tynan Sylvester’s Designing Games.  And if you are now in the process of trying to find a design job somewhere in the video game industry, you definitely need to read it.

– Si Dunn

Killer UX Design – How to create compelling, user-centered interfaces – #bookreview

Killer UX Design
Jodie Moule
(SitePoint – paperback, Kindle)

The overused term “killer app” tends to kill my curiosity about books with “killer” in the title.

Still,  “killer” title aside, Killer UX Design deserves some attention, particularly if you are struggling to create a better user experience (UX) for products, websites, services, processes, or systems. The eight chapters in this 266-page book provide a well-written “introduction to user experience design.”

The focus, in UX design, is on “understanding the behavior of the eventual users of a product, service, or system. It then seeks to explore the optimal interaction of these elements, in order to design experiences that are memorable, enjoyable, and a little bit ‘wow’,” the author says.

She is a psychologist who co-founded and directs Symplicit, an “experience design consultancy” in Australia. “With the digital and physical worlds merging more than ever before,” she says, “it is vital to understand how technology can enhance the human experience, and not cause frustration or angst at every touchpoint.”

You won’t find JavaScript functions, HTML 5 code, or other programming examples in this book, even though software engineering increasingly is a key factor in UX design. Instead, the tools of choice during initial design phases are: Post-It Notes, index cards, sheets of paper, tape, glue, hand-drawn diagrams and sketches, plus clippings from newspapers, magazines and other materials.

And, you likely will spend time talking with other members of your UX design team, plus potential users of your product, service, or system.

Some of the chapters also deal with prototyping, testing, re-testing and tweaking, and how to modify a design based on what you learn after a product, service, or system has been launched.

A key strength of Killer UX Design is how it  illustrates and explains the real-life — and seldom simple — processes and steps necessary to design an app that is both useful and easy to use.

– Si Dunn

Outsource It! — The good, bad, and ugly of offshoring tech projects – #bookreview

Outsource It!
A No-Holds-Barred Look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Offshoring Tech Projects
Nick Krym
(Pragmatic Bookshelf – paperback)

Like it or not, outsourcing tech projects is here to stay. It’s also there to stay, and everywhere else to stay.

There is no clear way that outsourcing will shrivel up and die within the interconnected and increasingly interdependent world economy.

So, perhaps it’s time to stop griping, resisting, and mouthing political slogans–and focus, instead, on finding ways to make the best of offshoring. There are ways to profit from its advantages. And there are ways to minimize the risks from its quirks, management challenges, traps and disadvantages.

Actually, some “offshoring” is “nearshoring.” To help keep development costs down, big corporations in North America sometimes farm out tech work to smaller companies and individual freelancers located in less-expensive areas of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

“Inshoring” happens, too. U.S. firms move some of their overseas tech operations back to the States, and foreign companies establish some tech outsource operations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Their outsourcing is our insourcing.

Outsourcing veteran Nick Krym calls his new book Outsource It! “a down-to-earth guide to offshore outsourcing.” It is aimed, he says, at “technology professionals…working in small- to medium-sized companies or in the technology trenches of large organizations.”

Outsource It! is well-written and packed with good information and how-to steps, plus insights drawn from Krym’s experiences and the experiences of many others in real-world offshoring. His 25 years in the IT industry include 20 years working in offshore outsourcing.

If you work in outsource situations, or if you are helping manage or set up an outsource team, you can glean good information and how-to ideas from Krym’s pages. And, you likely will want to keep the book handy in your reference collection, because he covers many “soft skills that need to be reinforced continuously until they become second nature.”

The 244-page book is divided into five main parts:

1. Decide If, What, and How to Outsource
2. Find the Right Vendors
3. Negotiate Solid Contracts
4. Lead Distributed Engagements
5. Keep Risks Under Control

Three appendices take you inside the positives and negatives of outsourcing to India, China, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Ireland, Israel, South America, Central America, Mexico, Canada, and the rural United States.

Other appendices offer: an “Outsourcing Readiness Assessment Checklist”; a summary of “Vendor Search Criteria”; an “Outsourcing Checklist”; and an “Offshore Vendor Technical Assessment” process.

As someone who previously worked in multinational software development, on projects involving teams in the U.S., Canada, France, Italy, Sweden and China, I found myself particularly agreeing with Krym’s assessments of software outsourcing.

“Many companies think that QA—software testing—is a logical function to outsource,” he reports. He offers several reasons why this not always “the most prudent approach” and describes what it takes to make offshore QA work.

For example: “The first rule of setting up a productive offshore team,” he stresses,” is to use QA professionals rather than software developer rejects or English major graduates.”

It is likewise vital to find “a solid QA lead—someone who is sufficiently technical, understands the process and requirements, and can manage the team.”

Krym further emphasizes that “[t]he cost difference between local and outsourced QA engineers is not always as dramatic as it is for developers.”

And: “Poor QA management can generate huge amounts of useless work, producing hard-to-manage artifacts and creating unhealthy team dynamics.”

Nick Krym’s new book is an excellent guide to the ins, outs and complex gray areas of outsourcing technology projects. And it’s not just for managers and executives. Employees, freelancers, and leaders of start-ups also can find ways to benefit and profit from the knowledge and experience Outsource It! offers.

– Si Dunn

All for Search and Search for All: 3 New Books for Putting Search to Work – #bookreview

Seek and ye shall find.

That’s the theory behind the still-debated benefits of digging through Big Data to uncover new, overlooked, or forgotten paths to greater profits and greater understanding.

Big Data, however, is here to stay (and get bigger). And search is what we do to find and extract useful nuggets and diamonds and nickels and dimes of information.

O’Reilly Media recently has published three new, enlightening books focused on the processes, application, and management of search: Enterprise Search by Martin White, Mastering Search Analytics by Brent Chaters, and Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender.

Here are short looks at each.

Enterprise Search
Martin White
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

Start with this book if you’re just beginning to explore what focused search efforts and search technology may be able to do for your company.

The book’s key goal is “to help business managers , and the IT teams supporting them, understand why effective enterprise-wide search is essential in any organization, and how to go about the process of meeting user requirements.”

You may think, So what’s the big deal? Just put somebody in a cubicle and pay them to use Google, Bing, and a few other search engines to find stuff.

Search involves much more than that. Even small businesses now have large quantities of potentially profitable information stored internally in documents, emails, spreadsheets and other formats. And large corporations are awash in data that can be mined for trends, warnings, new opportunities, new product or service ideas, and new market possibilities, to name just a few.

The goal of Enterprise Search is to help you set up a managed search environment that benefits your business but also enables employees to use search technology to help them do their jobs more efficiently and productively.

Yet, putting search technology within every worker’s reach is not the complete answer, author Martin White emphasizes.

“The reason for the well-documented lack of satisfaction with a search application,” he writes, “is that organizations invest in technology but not staff with the expertise and experience to gain the best possible return on the investment….”

Enterprise Search explains how to determine your firm’s search needs and how to create an effective search support team that can meet the needs of employees, management, and customers.

Curiously, White waits until his final chapter to list 12 “critical success factors” for getting the most from enterprise-wide search capabilities.

Perhaps, in a future edition, this important list will be positioned closer to the front of the book.

Mastering Search Analytics
Brent Chaters
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

This in-depth and well-illustrated guide details how a unified, focused search strategy can generate greater traffic for your website, increase conversion rates, and bring in more revenue.

Brent Chaters explains how to use search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search as part of an effective, comprehensive approach.

Key to Chaters’ strategy is the importance of bringing together the efforts and expertise of both the SEO specialists and the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) specialists — two groups that often battle each other for supremacy within corporate settings.

“A well-defined search program should utilize both SEO and SEM tactics to provide maximum coverage and exposure to the right person at the right time, to maximize your revenue,” Chaters contends. “I do not believe that SEO and SEM should be optimized from each other; in fact, there should be open sharing and examination of your overall search strategy.”

His book is aimed at three audiences: “the search specialist, the marketer, and the executive”–particularly executives who are in charge of search campaigns and search teams.

If you are a search specialist, the author expects that “you understand the basics of SEO, SEM, and site search (meaning you understand how to set up a paid search campaign, you understand that organic search cannot be bought, and you understand how your site search operates and works.)”

Search Patterns
Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

“Search applications demand an obsessive attention to detail,” the two authors of this fine book point out. “Simple, fast, and relevant don’t come easy.”

Indeed, they add, “Search is not a solved problem,” but remains, instead, “a wicked problem of terrific consequence. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is the defining element of the user experience. It changes the way we find everything…it shapes how we learn and what we believe. It informs and influences our decisions and, and it flows into every noon and cranny….Search is among the biggest, baddest, most disruptive innovations around. It’s a source of entrepreneurial insight, competitive advantage, and impossible wealth.”

They emphasize: “Unfortunately, it’s also the source of endless frustration. Search is the worst usability problem on the Web….We find too many results or too few, and most regular folks don’t know where to search, or how….business goals are disrupted by failures in findability…[and] “Mobile search is a mess.”

Ouch!

Colorfully illustrated and well-written, Search Patterns is centered around major aspects in the design of user interfaces for search and discovery. It is aimed at “designers, information architects, students, entrepreneurs, and anyone who cares about the future of search.”

It covers the key bases, “from precision, recall, and relevance to autosuggestion and faceted navigation.” It looks at how search may be reshaped in the future. And, very importantly, it also joins the growing calls for collaboration across disciplines and “tearing down walls to make search better….”

– Si Dunn

Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning – #programming #bookreview

Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning
James Pustejovsky and Amber Stubbs
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

You may not be sure what’s going on here, at first, even after you’ve read the tag line on the book’s cover: “A Guide to Corpus-Building for Applications.”

Fortunately, a few definitions inside this book can enlighten you quickly and might even get you interested in delving deeper into natural language processing and computational linguistics as a career.

“A natural language,” the authors note,” refers to any language spoken by humans, either currently (e.g., English, Chinese, Spanish) or in the past (e.g., Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit). Annotation refers to the process of adding metadata information to the text in order to augment a computer’s ability to perform Natural Language Processing (NLP).”

Meanwhile: “Machine learning refers to the area of computer science focusing on the development and implementation of systems that improve as they encounter more data.”

And, finally, what is a corpus? “A corpus,” the authors explain, “is a collection of machine-readable texts that have been produced in a natural communicative setting. They have been sampled to be representative and balanced with respect to particular factors; for example, by genre—newspaper articles, literary fiction, spoken speech, blogs and diaries, and legal documents.”

The Internet is delivering vast amounts of information in many different formats to researchers in the fields of theoretical and computational linguistics. And, in turn, specialists are now working to develop new insights and algorithms “and turn them into functioning, high-performance programs that can impact the ways we interact with computers using language.”

This book’s central focus is on learning how an efficient annotation development cycle works and how you can use such a cycle to add metadata to a training corpus that helps machine-language algorithms work more effectively.

Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning is not light reading. But it is well structured, well written and offers detailed examples. Using an effective hands-on approach, it takes the reader from annotation specifications and designs to the use of annotations in machine-language algorithms. And the final two chapters of the 326-page book “give a complete walkthrough of a single annotation project and how it was recreated with machine learning and rule-based algorithms.”

“[I]t is not enough,” the authors emphasize, “to simply provide a computer with a large amount of data and expect it to learn to speak—the data has to be prepared in such a way that the computer can more easily find patterns and inferences. This is usually done by adding relevant metadata to a dataset. Any metadata tag used to mark up elements of the dataset is called an annotation over the input. However,” they point out, “in order for the algorithms to learn efficiently and effectively, the annotation done on the data must be accurate, and relevant to the task the machine is being asked to perform. For this reason, the discipline of language annotation is a critical link in developing intelligent human language technology.”

– Si Dunn

Enterprise Games – How to build a better 21st-century business with game mechanics – #business #bookreview

Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business
Michael Hugos
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

Can 21^st-century games and gamers attack and destroy the top-down, assembly-line thinking that still keeps many businesses firmly rooted in the previous century?

 Michael Hugos’ compelling new book makes a solid case that they can. Game mechanics, he argues, can reshape how workers work, how organizations are managed, and how business goals get accomplished in today’s volatile global economy.

“Games and the associated technology we currently refer to as video games offer us more than just a diversion and escape from difficult times,” contends Hugos. “They offer us field-tested models to use for organizing companies and performing complex and creative tasks. They offer clear and compelling examples for how people can work together, build their careers, and earn a living in rapidly changing and unpredictable environments.”

Hugos, principal at the Center for Systems Innovation, offers his well-written views in a 199-page book “loosely divided into three parts.”

Part One focuses on “ideas and case studies to illustrate how games can provide operating models to follow for redesigning work.”

Part Two presents “a discussion of games and game mechanics that are relevant to the way work is done.” He includes “specific examples, pictures, and case studies to show how game techniques and technologies can be applied to the design of new business systems and workflows.”

Part Three “describes business and social impacts of combining technology from video games with in-house corporate systems, consumer technology, and cloud computing. The book concludes with a discussion about where this is all going and what it might mean for the future of work.”

During the coming months, Enterprise Games may spur many discussions and arguments at all levels of enterprise. And these may lead to some business-model reorganizations not only in Corporate America but elsewhere in the interconnected global economy.

For these changes to happen, however, many company leaders will have to stop thinking “top down” and learn to adapt ”the four traits of a game…goal, rules, feedback system, and voluntary participation” to how they to structure and operate a business.

“We all have a sense of what a game is,” Hugos notes. But most of us also have been taught that “play” is not “work.” Enterprise Games shows how the two concepts can be brought together in ways that can make companies more competitive and more profitable in these uncertain times.

– Si Dunn

Ethics of Big Data – Thoughtful insights into key issues confronting big-data ‘gold mines’ – #management #bookreview

Ethics of Big Data
Kord Davis, with Doug Patterson
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

“Big Data” and how to mine it for profit are red-hot topics in today’s business world. Many corporations now find themselves sitting atop virtual gold mines of customer information. And even small businesses now are attempting to find new ways to profit from their stashes of sales, marketing, and research data. 

Like it or not, you can’t block all of the cookies or tracking companies or sites that are following you, and each time you surf the web, you leave behind a “data exhaust” trail that has monetary value to others. Indeed, one recent start-up, Enliken, (“Data to the People”), is offering a way for computer users to gain some control over their data exhaust trail’s monetary value and choose who benefits from it, including some charities.

Ethics of Big Data does not seek to lay down a “hard-and-fast list of rules for the ethical handling of data.” The new book also doesn’t “tell you what to do with your data.” Its goals are “to help you engage in productive ethical discussions raised by today’s big-data-driven enterprises, propose a framework for thinking and talking about these issues, and introduce a methodology for aligning actions with values within an organization.”

It’s heady stuff, packed into just 64 pages. But the book is well written and definitely thought-provoking. It can serve as a focused guide for corporate leaders and others now hoping to get a grip on their own big-data situations, in ways that will not alienate their customers, partners, and stakeholders.

In the view of the authors: “For both individuals and organizations, four common elements define what can be considered a framework for big data:

• “Identity – What is the relationship between our offline identity and our online identity?”
• “Privacy – Who should control access to data?”
• “Ownership – Who owns data, can rights be transferred, and what are the obligations of people who generate and use that data?”
• “Reputation – How can we determine what data is trustworthy? Whether about ourselves, others, or anything else, big data exponentially increases the amount of information and ways we can interact with it. This phenomenon increases the complexity of managing how we are perceived and judged.”

Big-data technology itself is “ethnically neutral,” the authors contend, and it “has no value framework. Individuals and corporations, however, do have value systems, and it is only by asking and seeking answers to ethical questions that we can ensure big data is used in a way that aligns with those values.”

At the same time: “Big data is pushing corporate action further and more fully into individual lives through the sheer volume, variety, and velocity of the data being generated. Big-data product design, development, sales, and management actions expand their influence and impact over individuals’ lives that may be changing the common meanings of words like privacy, reputation, ownership, and identity.”

What will happen next as (1) big data continues to expand and intrude and (2) people and organizations  push back harder, is still anybody’s guess. But matters of ethics likely will remain at the center of the conflicts.

Indeed, some big-data gold mines could suffer devastating financial and legal cave-ins if greed is allowed to trump ethics.

– Si Dunn

Shipping Greatness – How to build and launch outstanding software – #bookreview #projectmanagement

Shipping Greatness
Chris Vander Mey
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

The subtitle of this excellent new book deserves its own paragraph, so here it is:

“Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon.”

Back when I worked in software development, we never shipped “greatness,” nor anything that resembled “outstanding.” We shipped software that was overdue, incomplete, and inadequately tested. Then we followed up, always in panic mode, with patches, dot releases, and releases that had multiple dots.

Everyone – from our customers to our sales force, managers, and finance department— hated us. (Indeed, more than once, I was a tech-writer minion in a software-development group that was thrown out an employer’s door en masse.)

Anyone who works in software development today or manages software development teams should consider reading Chris Vander Mey’s spirited and eye-opening project management guide.

“Shipping,” he writes, “is about meeting customer needs well and quickly, in addition to becoming rich and famous. Your mission, therefore, is to solve a customer problem. Your strategy is your unique approach to meeting a need that a group of people—a market segment—shares. It sounds pretty simple, and it is, in theory.”

In reality, of course, it is also fraught with crises, gotchas, unwanted surprises, management squabbles, and corporate-wide earthquakes, to name just a few distractions.

With this book, his goal is to get you beyond management theory and into the rapid, real-life flow of software creation and shipping, with the skills and knowledge necessary to both survive and thrive.

Shipping Greatness is organized into two parts and contains a total of 215 pages, 13 chapters and three appendices.

Part One: The Shipping Greatness Process

• 1. How to Build a Great Mission and Strategy
• 2. How to Define a Great Product
• 3. How to Build a Great User Experience
• 4. How to Achieve Project Management Greatness on a Budget
• 5. How to Do a Great Job Testing
• 6. How to Measure Greatness
• 7. How to Have a Great Launch

Part Two: The Shipping Greatness Skills

• 8. How to Build a Shipping-Ready Team
• 9. How to Build Great, Shippable Technology
• 10. How to Be a Great Shipping Communicator
• 11. How to Make Great Decisions
• 12. How to Stay a Great Person While Shipping
• 13. That Was Great; Let’s Do It Again

The three appendices are: Appendix A – 10 Principals of Shipping; Appendix B – Essential Artifacts Your Team Needs; and Appendix C – References and Further Reading.

Chris Vander Rey’s new book offers a wealth of how-to discussions, techniques to consider, and tips to adopt. One of my favorite small bits of advice is: Never have a launch party during a software launch. “It’s really demoralizing when your team members can’t go to their own party,” he says. Instead, many of them likely will be hunched in their cubicles monitoring server traffic or watching for user problems with the release.

You can’t get a degree (yet) in this kind of shipping. But Shipping Greatness is the textbook that can help you graduate to greatness in the ever-changing, ever-challenging world of software.

– Si Dunn

Deploying Rails – A good how-to guide covering choices, tools & best practices – #programming #bookreview

Deploying Rails: Automate, Deploy, Scale, Maintain, and Sleep at Night
Anthony Burns and Tom Copeland (Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback)

Maybe you have been studying Ruby and Rails and now feel ready for the next big step. Perhaps you are already on a job where a Rails application needs to be deployed and running on a server ASAP. Or, maybe you manage a team that must deploy and support a Rails app, and you want to understand more of what they actually must accomplish to get the app up and running – and keep it running.

Deploying Rails is a very good guide to the decisions that must be made and to the tools and best practices essential for success. The two writers are both professional Rails developers with strong backgrounds.

Their 217-page book, they note, “is “centered around an example social networking application called MassiveApp. While MassiveApp may not have taken the world by storm just yet, we’re confident that it’s going to be a winner, and we want to build a great environment in which MassiveApp can grow and flourish. This book will take us through that journey.”

That “journey” is organized into 10 chapters and two appendices, all well written and illustrated with code examples.

• Chapter 1: Introduction – (including choosing a hosting location)
• Chapter 2: Getting Started with Vagrant – (setting up and managing a virtual server and virtual machines)
• Chapter 3: Rails on Puppet – (“arguably the most popular open source server provisioning tool.…”)
• Chapter 4: Basic Capistrano – (“the premier Rails deployment utility….”)
• Chapter 5: Advanced Capistrano – (deals with making deployments faster and also easier when “deploying to multiple environments.”)
• Chapter 6: Monitoring with Naigos – (monitoring principles and how to apply them to Rails apps. Also, how to perform several types of checks.)
• Chapter 7: Collecting Metrics with Ganglia – (how to gather a Rails app’s important metrics from an infrastructure level and an application level.)
• Chapter 8: Maintaining the Application – (how to handle “the ongoing care and feeding of a production Rails application.”)
• Chapter 9: Running Rubies with RVM – (using the Ruby enVironmental Manager [RVM] in development and deployment.)
• Chapter 10: Special Topics – (“We’ll sweep through the Rails technology stack starting at the application level and proceed downward to the operating system, hitting on various interesting ideas as we go.”)

The two appendices cover (1) “a line-by-line review of a Capistrano deployment file” and (2) “deploying MassiveApp to an alternative technology stack consisting of nginx and Unicorn.”

A key focus of the book is building a set of configuration files and keeping the latest versions stored in Git, so deployment of a new or updated app can go smoother.

Deploying a Rails app involves making many different choices, and the process can go wrong quite easily if not set up properly.

“The most elegant Rails application,” the authors caution, “can be crippled by runtime environment issues that make adding new servers an adventure, unexpected downtime a regularity, scaling a difficult task, and frustration a constant.

“Good tools do exist for deploying, running, monitoring, and measuring Rails applications, but pulling them together into a coherent whole is no small effort.”

Deploying Rails can significantly ease the complicated process of getting a new Rails application running on a server. Equally important, Rails experts Anthony Burns and Tom Copeland can show you how to keep the app running smoothly and configured for growth as it gains users, functionality, and popularity.

– Si Dunn