Tomorrow at the Agile 2009 conference, Abby Fichtner and Nate Oster are doing a workshop called Where Does Developer Testing End and Tester Testing Begin?. Jenny and I hope you can make it, because they’ll be doing a giveaway of autographed copies Beautiful Teams. Check out my O’Reilly Community posts for more information:

• Agile testing and Beautiful Teams (giveaway)
• Agile testing: why good developers resist great habits

In that second post, I spend a little time talking about some of the reasons that programmers resist great practices like test-driven development. Writing that post reminded me of something that Jenny and I wrote about change in Applied Software Project Management:

Many project managers—especially ones who have a technical background—tend to ignore the fact that their organizations are made up of people who need to be convinced of the importance of a change before they will adopt it. Some of these people will have an emotional or even irrational response to any attempt at change; it could take a sea change in the organization before they agree to it.

Irrational attitudes about software development usually boil down to two basic beliefs. First, people believe that most or all software projects are delivered late and delivered with many bugs, and that this is just a fact of life. Second, they believe that their organization is unique, and that the problems they are experiencing are particular to their organization and have never been seen before in any other organization.

(This second belief may seem odd, considering the many thousands of software organizations around the world that have all used similar tools and techniques to fix very similar problems and make real, lasting improvements. It’s possible that the belief in uniqueness comes from the fact that the software being built truly is unique, in that it has never been built before; it’s not a leap to assume—incorrectly—that the software project and all of itsproblems are therefore also unique to that particular organization.)

Many times, resistance is not irrational at all. Anyone who has been through a change previously—possibly a passing management fad—that didn’t fix the problem (or failed outright) may be resistant to another change. It may seem unfair, but if people in your organization have previously gone through poorly planned changes, it will be harder for you to make changes of your own.

When you are introducing new tools, techniques, or practices in your organization, you may encounter resistance for a number of reasons. By exploring the feelings, fears, and justifications for resisting change that project managers commonly encounter, these reactions can be unraveled and understood.

— Stellman & Greene, Applied Software Project Management, p206 (O’Reilly 2005)

It’s really easy to forget about this when you’re pushing for a change, especially something that requires extra work and learning. (I had to learn that the hard way – hopefully you won’t have to!)

Remember back in January, when Tim O’Reilly blogged about great Bookscan numbers for Head First C#?

Well, Bookscan numbers don’t always match what you see on Amazon.com. Our intrepid little book has been clawing its way up the Amazon.com sales ranks. It was in the #2 position on the C# bestseller list for the last month. But when I checked a few minutes ago, it was at the top of the list!

This is a huge deal for us — it’s definitely a high-water mark for the book. And what’s really cool is that Head First C# is picking up steam. Its Amazon sales rank was under 500 all day yesterday, which means that it was one of the top 500 books sold by Amazon.com. (Not the top 500 tech books — the top 500 books.) Typically, books sell the most in the first few months, and Head First C# had a strong start out of the gate. But one of our friends at O’Reilly let us know a few days ago that we’re selling better than ever (when you discount the backorders that had to be filled, which always skew the first month’s results).

And Head First PMP is picking up steam, too! It’s been holding onto the #2 spot for PMP exam prep books, and it’s really been gaining over the last few months.

Now, Jenny and I aren’t all about sales. But we are all about helping people learn, and we see these numbers as a real win.

We’ve been keeping ourselves busy! What’s that? You want to know more? Well, certainly. We’ve got lots of news:

• Jenny and I are doing some guest blogging on the Head First Labs website, talking about what it’s like writing a Head First book (and whatever else we feel like talking about). I’ll be doing the posts this week, starting with one called “How We Made Head First C# Different”. I’ll probably get a little more technical near the end of the week — there’s only so much anyone wants to read about writing books. (Or is there?)
• We’ve put up a new training page, because we’ve been getting a lot of questions about training. It’s a list of the various courses we offer on project management and software development. Right now, we’re mainly concentrating on training corporate teams — we’ll go into a company and do a few days of training for a team. We’ve been getting an increasing number of inquiries about putting together classes that are open to the public, though. If you’re interested in that, please drop us a note using our contacts page and we’ll let you know the next time we’re offering one.
• Last week we were invited to do our “Why Projects Fail” talk for the PMINYC Breakfast Roundtable. After the talk, one of the audience members came up to me to thank us for doing a presentation that wasn’t boring. I thought that was pretty cool! Anyway, here are the slides from the talk.
• We’ve been doing our “Why Projects Fail” talk at companies around town. If you work at a company in New York City and want some insight into why projects fail, you’ve got a brown-bag lunch program (or some other kind of program where your company brings speakers in to do a talk), and you can get a reasonably-sized audience together, get in touch with us — we’re usually happy to come in and do it as part of our New York outreach program. It’s generally pretty fun, and a good way to take your mind off of the job for an hour.

Hey, we’re super-busy, so I’ll have to keep this short and sweet. But Jenny and I have some news, and we wanted to share it with you.

1. We’re in the home stretch on Head First C#. We should be done with the manuscript in the next couple of weeks, which means that it should be in stores sometime in November (if we understand the production schedule correctly).
2. We’re doing a talk tomorrow at a NYC SPIN / PMINYC meeting. It’s a variant of our “Why Projects Fail” talk — we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback about it, so it should be fun. Unfortunately, registration has closed for it — it’s sold out — but we’ll post slides afterwards.
3. There was just a great article published on Inc. Magazine’s technology site that quotes us pretty extensively. We had a good talk with the author, Renee Oricchio, and she really got a good sense of what we were saying. It’s called “Getting In-house Software Shops Back on Track”.

Sorry about the quick update – we know we’re phoning it in, but we’ll be more chatty once the book’s out the door.

We promised to upload the slides and post a couple of links, so here they are. Here’s the PowerPoint presentation [PPT] and a PDF version [PDF].You guys asked great questions — some of the best we’ve ever gotten at one of our talks. Here are a few of the answers that we promised:

• A few of you had questions about estimation, specifically the Wideband Delphi process that we’ve had a lot of success with. You can read about it in Chapter 3 of our first book, Applied Software Project Management– here’s a link to a PDF of the chapter [PDF]. We give a pretty detailed description of exactly how to hold a Wideband Delphi meeting, and how you can use it on your own projects to improve how they’re estimated.
• One person brought up a really good point about integration, and how that’s an important failure point that gets neglected, and we mentioned that we’d post a link to an article we wrote for Dr. Dobb’s Journal on integration testing called “Better, Stronger, Faster Integration Testing: Giving developers a personal stake in software quality.”
• I think a lot of the questions near the end of the talk about open source projects were answered in our ONLamp.com article called “What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source”. Also, here’s a link to the “What Makes Open Source Projects Work” presentation I gave last January at the SD Best Practices India 2007 conference.
• No, we don’t have an official release date for “Head First C#” yet, but we’re definitely making good progress on it. Keep watching this blog — as soon as O’Reilly has an official release date for it, we’ll post about it. And yes, it is really fun to write a Head First book.
• After the talk, a few people asked about our availability to come in and do training. Our consulting schedule is a little tight because of our pretty aggressive writing schedule for O’Reilly, but we do have some availability. You can use our “Contact Us” page to get in touch with us about consulting and speaking — serious inquiries only, please.

We’re always happy to answer questions about anything we talk or write about. Feel free to get in touch with us any time!

That’s why we created a 200 question, free PMP practice exam and worked with our partners at O’Reilly to set up free forums to help our readers ace the exam. We do our best to read and respond to questions there and keep the discussions alive.

You can download the test here: http://www.headfirstlabs.com/PMP/free_exam/

When we created the exam, we closely followed the Project Management Professional (PMP®) Examination Specification. It’s is a little harder than the questions in the book, and it’s meant to closely mimic the real thing.

If you’re looking to take the PMP soon, please download it and give it a whirl. If you have any questions, feel free to talk to us in the PMP General Discussion Forum. And if you get some time to write questions and help other people study, that’s even better.

Good luck!

So we’re back. And now that we’re not spending every waking minute working on PMP, we’ve got time to write about all that good stuff you love to read about. Keep your eyes open for new posts. Also, you may notice a slight change in our style. (Once you start writing Head First, it’s hard to stop!) And definitely don’t be shy — you can always get in touch with us on the Head First Labs forum for Head First PMP.

http://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/project-management-training-course-article012.php

I think it definitely captures what we were trying accomplish with our book. I agree with almost all of his criticisms — for the most part, they are a reflection of decisions that we made about the direction of the book. (As you know, in any project of any reasonable size the team always has to make tradeoffs!)

I liked what he had to say about our writing style, which I really think is a strength of our book:

• There are too many books about software project management or software engineering which are dry, overly complex and boring, but this book is not one of them. It was a joy to read because their style of writing is clear without being simplistic and the authors describe things in just the right amount of detail. It seems they understand their audience and set out to write in an extremely helpful and practical way. They have certainly achieved this.

And I especially like this part:

• I would recommend this book to anyone who works on a software development team because the book has so much practical advice to help people improve their capability to deliver quality software. Come to think of it, I would also recommend it to senior managers of companies who have a negative view of their own software development teams. Perhaps then senior managers might understand why committing resources to process improvement is one of the best investments they can make.

Exactly! I’m really glad that idea came across — it was a point that Jenny and I really thought was important.