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Ask HN: Book on organizing engineering team / process?

2 points| founder_qw | 7 years ago | reply

I understand it's a strange question for HN, but please bear with me.

We managed to get to profitability and VC funding with a very small team using somewhat free-form process. Everyone did everything, fires were put out all the time. Now we have resources to change that.

Problem is that none of the founders worked in the tech company before (we come from research / academia).

The product itself is very technical and we definitely see the technical debt accumulating.

Right now is the moment to get way more diligent about how we organize the process.

We don't expect to hire an experienced tech manager right away (it's a tough hire) and would have to deal with a growing team of engineers for at least a few months.

Are there good book(s) someone can read about the organizational / process side of leading tech team? Code reviews, pair programming, senior - junior roles and who should do what. Scheduled VS "when it's ready" releases. Milestones, standup meetings. The kind of processes that were developed by the industry to help steer the tech ship?

Not asking about the books on general management and how to deal with people, mostly interested in the functional part of it.

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[+] mindcrime|7 years ago|reply
Ship It, and all the other books in that series from Pragmatic Press. Code Complete and Rapid Code by McConnell. The Deadline by DeMarco. Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber. Peopleware by DeMarco. Slack by DeMarco.

Anything by Ed Yourdon.