Starting a Tech Business - A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

TechStars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator with operations in three U.S. cities. Once a year in each city, it funds about ten Internet startups with a small amount of capital and surrounds them with around fifty top Internet entrepreneurs and investors. Historically, about seventy-five percent of the companies that go through TechStars raise a meaningful amount of angel or venture capital. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is a collection of advice that comes from individuals who have passed through, or are part of, this proven program. Each vignette is an exploration of information often heard during the TechStars program and provides practical insights into early stage entrepreneurship.

• Contains seven sections, each focusing on a major theme within the TechStars program, including idea and vision, fundraising, legal and structure, and work/life balance
• Created by two highly regarded experts in the world of early stage investing
• Essays in each section come from the experienced author team as well as TechStar mentors, entrepreneurs, and founders of companies

“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.”
—Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management

“There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.”
—Grady Booch, IBM Fellow

Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development.

• Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods.
• Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level.
• Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale.

This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.

This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable

rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through

automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between

developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—

sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk

delivery process. Next, they introduce the “deployment pipeline,” an automated process for

managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the “ecosystem” needed to

support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance.

The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management

and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best

practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes

• Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software

• Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels

• Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations

• Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams

• Implementing an effective configuration management strategy

• Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation

• Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements

• Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases

• Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies

• Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing

Whether you’re a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your

organization move from idea to release faster than ever—so you can deliver value to your business

rapidly and reliably.

“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.”

–From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development

Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments.

• Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels
• Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements
• Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams
• Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios

This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.

8 POWERFUL WAYS TO INSPIRE TODAY’S TOUGH CUSTOMERS IN TOUGH TIMES AND MAKE THEM STICK!

“With Jim Champy’s well-proven gift for keen management analysis, today’s essential notions of business transparency, channel and customer alignment, and enduring cultural values become palpable, memorable, and—most important—usable.”

Alan Spoon, Managing General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners

“If you love the game of business, you’d be hard pressed to find a book with more ‘good moves’ per page than INSPIRE!”

Paal Gisholt, President and CEO, SmartPak

“Full of insightful ideas, this book is for those who like winning, who embrace innovation, and who wish to transform how they lead. It is not for the defenders of the status quo.”

Michael Dowling, President and CEO, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System

“INSPIRE! provides ‘food for thought’ and insightful guidance for all companies. This is particularly important in today’s economy where even established companies are looking for ways to maintain the growth they have enjoyed in better times.”

Chiquita White, Section Head, Product Development, Procter & Gamble

Jim Champy revolutionized business with Reengineering the Corporation. Now, in Inspire!, the second book in a series about what’s new and really works in business, he takes on the challenge of inspiring customers–even in tough times. In an era of commoditization and ever less loyal customers, this book shows how to keep customers coming back.

Drawing on dozens of original case studies from companies in a variety of industries, new and old, Champy reveals how to define a consistent value proposition your customers will be passionate about–and will stay passionate about. You’ll learn how to engage a new generation of customers who value transparency and authenticity above all...how to reinvigorate your company in the face of brutally tough and creative competition...how to go beyond mere marketing campaigns to lead crusades customers want to join.

Once again, Jim Champy has given businesses actionable solutions to one of the most challenging problems they currently face: making customers stick.

How to reignite customer loyalty by…

•   Bringing authenticity to everything you do

•   Creating new products that reflect the best of what you really are

•   Delivering new value based on convenience, simplicity, and honesty

•   Nurturing your mystique

•   Choosing the right channel partners

•   Doing well by doing good

Want more? Check out the e-book collection, Jim Champy on What's Really Working in Business.  This brand new collection contains state-of-the-art business insights from world-renowned expert Jim Champy…now in a convenient e-format, at a great price!

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