Beautiful Teams - New from O'Reilly

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or interview with the
author, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7314 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

Beautiful Teams - New From O'Reilly
Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

Sebastopol, CA--You can argue about practices until you're blue in the
face--such as when is the correct time to do requirements gathering, or
how do you make a project more or less agile--but that's not where the
real meat of the work happens. "How you make those decisions has an impact
on a project, certainly, and sometimes a big one," say Andrew Stellman and
Jennifer Greene.  "But it's not nearly as important as 'who' you have on
your team: how skilled they are, and how well they work together." 

Stellman and Greene are veteran software engineers and project managers
who have been writing bestselling books for O'Reilly since 2005. Their
latest book, "Beautiful Teams" (O'Reilly, US $39.99) takes readers behind
the scenes with some of the most interesting teams in software engineering
history. Learn from veteran team leaders' successes and failures, told
through a series of engaging personal stories and interviews.

"We recruited contributors from as many different industries and areas of
interest as possible: from defense to social organizing, from academic
research to video game development, from aerospace and defense to search
engines, and from project managers to 'boots-on-the-ground' programmers
and system admins," Greene and Stellman recall.  "There are people who we
met over the course of our educations and work lives. There are
contributors from a wide range of companies, including people who worked
(and, in some cases, still work) at NASA, Google, IBM, and Microsoft." 

The conversations in the "Beautiful Teams" are organized in four
categories:  people (who's on the team), goals (what brings them
together), practices (how they build the software), and obstacles (what
gets in their way). Contributors include Grady Booch, Barry Boehm, Steve
McConnell, Karl Wiegers, as well as legendary music producer Tony
Visconti, and Tim O'Reilly. 

"If you picked up this book hoping to find the 'One Correct Way' to run a
beautiful team, we're really sorry, because that's not what this book is
about," Stellman and Greene say. "But if you're looking to gain some
insight into what makes a good team tick, and what you can do to take a
mediocre team and make it better--or take a great team and make it crash
and burn--you're going to get a lot out of this book."

Jennifer Greene has spent the past 15 years or so building software for
many different kinds of companies. She's built software test teams and
helped lots of companies diagnose and deal with habitual process problems
so that they could build better software. Jennifer founded Stellman &
Greene Consulting with Andrew Stellman in 2003. For more information about
Jennifer, Andrew Stellman, and their books, visit
http://www.stellman-greene.com.

Andrew Stellman comes from a programming background, and has managed teams
of requirements analysts, designers, and developers. He and Jennifer
Greene formed Stellman & Greene Consulting in 2003, with a focus on
project management, software development, management consulting, and
software process improvement.

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bio, and samples, see:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596518028/

Beautiful Teams
Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene
ISBN: 978-0-596-51802-8, 508 pages, US $39.99
order@oreilly.com
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