Preface
BEAUTIFUL TEAMSWAS CONCEIVED IN LATE 2007 DURING A CHANCE MEETING IN O'REILLY EDITOR Andy Oram's office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We'd been invited to give a talk for the local PMI chapter, and we decided to take the opportunity to drop by the O'Reilly office to say "Hi" and finally put faces to some very familiar voices we'd worked with over the years. Beautiful Code had spent a few months at the top of the O'Reilly bestseller list, and the company was looking to follow up with another anthology. Since we've spent so much of our careers talking and writing about how projects work and how teams build software, the idea for Beautiful Teams basically fell out of thin air.
The original idea was just to follow up on Beautiful Code with a straightforward anthology about project management. Like all great projects, Beautiful Teams took on a life of its own. It attracted contributors of an incredibly high caliber. It became a journey for us, allowing us the opportunity to learn from some of the brightest minds in software development today. These are personal stories and experiences. Each person who contributed to this book is talking about his or her own past work life, which very few of us ever get a chance to examine. And every single contributor was happy to donate his or her time and effort without any payment whatsoever; proceeds from this book are instead being donated to PlayPumps International.
How This Book Is Organized
Here is a short summary of the chapters in this ...