Jounce is a real physics term – it’s the fourth derivative of position over time.

Though the term ‘jounce’ is seldom encountered in science class, we often go through life being jounced: jerked around in several directions at once. From a traffic ticket to bad news from your doctor to a global catastrophe, the sources for being jounced are all around us.

This book is about dealing with being jounced. What started in anger six years ago has transformed into raised awareness and intention of the journey that the author has been on all his life.

Dealing with a growing concern for where our collective lives are headed (with only some factors within our control) while working to craft a fulfilled life and a lasting legacy can be daunting work. For most of us, it remains far easier to comfortably continue meandering through our daily existence, making ends meet, absorbed in social media, and focused on the present, blissfully unaware of the storm clouds on all of our horizons.

Jounce is an intensely personal exploration of the challenges we face and some of the characteristics of human nature that drive how we deal with our world. It describes one person’s strategy for building a resilient life but can applied more broadly. While a journey such as this is critical to help you in managing crises, you’ll find that it’s not all hard work, and your life can become more fulfilling in the process.

Jim Brosseau’s first book has been released from Addison Wesley Professional. This book distills Jim’s experience with a wide range of teams over the years, both as an employee and as a consultant.

It examines the challenges and barriers we face with typical approaches when attempting to build effective teams. Each of us can take responsibility for personal and team success and the book describes a meaningful progression of steps to achieve this goal.

In doing so, Software Teamwork helps you look beyond the traditional team building approaches to explore personal motives, attitudes, skills and interpersonal relationships – all fair game as potential opportunities for improvement.

Order today from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com, or the print or eBook versions directly from Pearson Education.

Please contact us for information regarding this book, or the team-building course based on the principles in this book.

Practical Agility is a collection of observations gathered over the past 10 years on the practice of Agile in the software industry. It looks at agility from the objective perspective of someone that doesn’t depend on selling the concept to make a living.

There are plenty of models for software development out there. Some may even be relevant to your culture, your product, and your industry space. It is highly unlikely that any of these will be a perfect fit right out of the box.  You should always be critical about the choices presented. Learn about as many as possible, use the bits that work, and continuously reflect and improve upon the past.

There are many good things to come out of the agile movement. It’s finally OK to talk about how we develop software, something that was taboo when ‘process improvement’ was a catch phrase. There are a number of good ideas that have been borrowed from other domains and applied to software development, and many good practices have been recast in terminology that makes it easier for technologists to buy into the ideas.

There are also some glaring challenges.

The blatant demonizing of pre-agile approaches would suggest that there were no successful software projects before the manifesto came out. Whereas in my experience there hasn’t been significant change (at least not nearly as significant as agile apologists would have you believe with their biased data).

There are things that remain unsaid and are taken for granted in many of the agile pitches that need to be explicitly stated, such as effective configuration management and mature team interaction.

Many of the practices that are touted as new inventions are simply reincarnations of good things that people have done for decades (the down side of that recasting mentioned above).

On balance, if we think of agility as an adjective rather than a verb, we’ll be better off. This book talks about how to be agile, rather than how to do agile.