Takeaways from our book on agile project management in GitHub

Today we’re relaunching our first eBook, Better Software & Stronger Teams under a new, better-fitting title: Project Management for Teams in GitHub. We’ve updated the entire book – from cover to cover – to ensure it’s relevant and up to date in 2021.

The book still aims to answer this key question:

How do you manage projects?

We get this question over and over: on calls; at conferences; over email. Unsurprisingly so, since we spend more time than most thinking about the best ways to set up, manage, and ship software projects.

Since we first wrote this book, ZenHub has evolved towards taking a stronger stance for agile and Scrum, so we wanted to ensure the book reflected that. It’s only natural that we shift the book’s focus to agile project management, as we’ve been working hard to add features like automated sprints, planning poker, and epics to ZenHub!

This book brings together our best practices, hard-learned truths, and detailed workflow examples, taking readers through a software project from beginning to end.

You’ll learn how to build better software and a more collaborative team.

You’ll hear from some very smart people, like Jono Bacon (former head of community at GitHub and Ubuntu) and Henrik Kniberg (author of Scrum and XP from the Trenches and agile coach for Spotify and Lego). Along the way, we’ve also included dozens of links to our favorite resources on everything from product management, to the perfect pull request, to productivity. Think of it as the ultimate guide to mastering collaboration in GitHub.

A note on our approach

After all that experimentation, we landed on what works best for us and what we recommend for other teams, too: a sprint-based Scrum methodology from the Agile school.

We think working in sprints is the best way to get the most done, in the least time, with the fewest headaches. It promotes speed, flexibility, and collaboration, plus it centers user requests and ensures the team is routinely shipping impactful code.

However, we acknowledge that teams can’t change ingrained habits and processes overnight. Shifting your workflow to an Agile and Scrum framework takes effort and time. There will be headaches, but in the end we think it’s well worth it.
However you choose to work, the North Star should be this:

If it works, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t.

The purpose of this book is to arm you with strategies that could work for your team.

We hope this will be a resource you’ll refer to again and again. It’s available here to download for free.

Read it, share it, and give it to your favourite project manager. Then tell us how your team stays fast and collaborative. We’d love to hear.

Happy reading. ✌️

Tyler Gaffney,
CEO at ZenHub

Want new collaboration ideas your team can use today? Grab your copy of GitHub Project Management here.