Packt Publishing’s 2000th title: “Buy One, Get One Free” offer

Packt Publishing reached a remarkable result: 2000th titles!

And guess what? …  they are inviting you to join the party and have a special present for you.

Packt Publishing is running this offer: “Buy One, Get One Free on all of Packt’s 2000 ebooks”

This motto is self-explaining, ain’t it ?

So, just remember these rules:

• Unlimited purchases during the offer period
• Offer is automatically applied at checkout

or do they seems more benefits than rules ? 😉

Do you need to know more? Read here: http://bit.ly/1j26nPN

This offer will end soon, only few days to 26 Mar … so HURRY UP!!!

source: http://bit.ly/1j26nPN

Kanban for skeptics by Nick Oostvogels

Someone says: well, if you can’t play Scrum, play Kanban!
because that someone means of it as Scrum’s fallback.

But, it’s not!
Kanban is not just WIP limits, and this book gives you a deeper knoledge of Kanban’s way, the idea behind, estimates, measurement, teams, cooperation … where everyone is involved in end-to-end process.

Here are some bold points:

• bug:
  As soon as this happens, the team should have a natural reflex to drop what they started on and fix the feature immediatly. […] In Kanban bugs causes the flow to be interruped and the people to get stuck because of the WIP limits that are reached
• team members reassignent:
  Kanban simplifies this issue significantly. By letting a team work on one continuos flow, they don’t need to be reassigned over and over again

• stakeholders’s focus:
  if stakeholder can focus onn the products, and not on the resource planning,they can make better economical decisions[…]it’s now a business decision based on the needs of the customers and the organization

• silo:
  the answer[…] is to create cross silo functions who’s task lies in creating alignment and controlling the end to end process.[…] Teams get busted out ot their silo thinking by becoming part of an end to end process

last one:

It is a strange idea that by measuring flow instead of setting deadlines, work will be done efficiently. Kanban create awareness on the importanceof every phase in the process. Instead of pushing each individual phase to go faster, we optimize the whole.

source: Kanban for skeptics

source: Kanban for skeptics (article on InfoQ)

Technorati tags: Agile, Kanban, Scrum

The Scrum Primer

Living these holidays a good way: reading books! 🙂

Going again the Scrum road, because of this book The Scrum Primer (available here)
New to Scrum? short eperienced?
this book helps you understand better what Scrum is for, also strenghtness and weakness compared to your context.
It helped me clearing couple of foggy areas I always wanted to know more about,
in example: do PO is a lone person? or is it better if shared among some people? … being a PO is a job that comes with great honor but greater responsibility, “life” of product backlog, when&where priorities can changes, dev team duties, sprint’s length, sprint review (it is not just a demo), definition of done (remember potentially shippable product) … and much much much more I don’t want to reveal 😉

There are also some areas I’d read more details about: sprint review, sprint retrospective, daily duties of scrum master, cooperation among the whole scrum team …

More than just the usual blog post, article, etc … this short ebook worth a couple reads 😉

thanks to Fabio Armani for sharing this ebook 🙂

source: The Scrum Primer (by InfoQ)
source: Scrum Primer (via linkedin)

Technorati tags: Agile, Scrum

Free ebook from Microsoft: Exploring CQRS and Event Sourcing

Pasted from the source: Book Download: Exploring CQRS and Event Sourcing

A journey into high scalability, availability and maintainability with Windows Azure

Overview

Authors: Dominic Betts, Julián Domínguez, Grigori Melnik, Fernando Simonazzi, Mani Subramanian.
Foreword by Greg Young.

This guide is focused on building highly scalable, highly available, and maintainable applications with the Command & Query Responsibility Segregation and the Event Sourcing architectural patterns. It presents a learning journey, not definitive guidance. It describes the experiences of a development team with no prior CQRS proficiency in building, deploying (to Windows Azure), and maintaining a sample real-world, complex, enterprise system to showcase various CQRS and ES concepts, challenges, and techniques. The development team did not work in isolation; we actively sought input from industry experts and from a wide group of advisors to ensure that the guidance is both detailed and practical.

source: Book Download: Exploring CQRS and Event Sourcing

Technorati tags: Microsoft, CQRS

Virtualization for dummies (free ebook pdf)

Sysadm or devop beginner ?
Never heard of virtualization? (a little bit strange but it could happens! 🙂 )
Just curious ?
Want to show to your boss ? 😀

A very short and easy book about virtualization.
Maybe you find same info in blogs, faq guide, tutorials …
this is all-in-one paper very easy … the right for CEO 😀 (actually I mean !geek 😉 )

Amazon (kindle version): Virtualization for dummies
AMD (free ebook pdf): Virtualization for dummies – Sun and AMD special edition 😉

Technorati tags: Virtualization