Holiday reading

I spent a few days on the beautiful island of Tenerife. Except from jumping into the Atlantic and having a sundowner occasionally, I caught up on my reading list, which I want to share with you.

Impact mapping

It’s the book to the website! Well, at least kind of. The books provides deeper insight on the topic of impact mapping than the accompanying website does. So what is impact mapping? It’s a method to visualize value and thus focuses on the value side of software development which often enough gets neglected, at least by more technical people. Impact mapping asks the questions why, who, how, what and tries to put things into a bigger perspective. I was very intrigued by this and wanted to have a session at our company’s bar camp on this. Which I didn’t because I didn’t feel secure enough to do so just after reading the book. So my plan is to scrimmage through an example for myself. But if you feel that making the value side of things more visible bears any value for you, I recommend that you have a look at the website and the book as well.

A company on the edge

This is a book that I wanted to read out of nostalgia reasons. I still own a C64 (though am too afraid to turn it on in case it might be broken) and have a lot of fond memories of the home computer age. The book is about the rise and fall of the commodore company, what they did to have their huge success and what they did to eventually flush their success down the drain.  Every once in a while there is a book that totally gets you hooked for reasons very different than you initially think of. This is one of these books. I couldn’t put it away, had to read on and quite regularly thought along the lines “oh, that’s what we are doing!” or “yeah, that failed for us, too.” This is pretty much a book about the dos and don’ts of modern software development.
So if you have the faintest interested in that topic, I totally recommend getting this book. And it is easy reading as well, containing quite some anecdotes and stories, which neatly fit into this company biography. The only bad thing about it is the German title, which is “Volkscomputer“…

Improving agile teams

Not really a testing book, but more of an agile book. I read the book, thought something “well, yeah, kinda nice, but nothing fancy” and ended up using parts of it in discussions and retrospectives with really planning to do so. Things stuck with me, you could say. The author uses his background and knowledge in impro(v) theatre to do things in scrum retrospectives differently. He provides quite some games and methods that build up on each other nicely dealing with the main principles of improvisional theatre: safety, spontaneity, storytelling, status and sensitivity. So, if you are a scrum master, looking for some inspiration of how to do things, this little gem is certainly worth having a look at.