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Body of Knowledge · Reference

Sources

Every work the standard cites. Each is real and checkable — author, title, year — and the note says what the standard takes from it. The text of the standard is original throughout; it cites, it does not reproduce.

Books

  • Adam Shostack. Threat Modeling: Designing for Security. Wiley, 2014.
    threat modelling as a design discipline; the four questions
  • Alfred D. Chandler Jr.. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. MIT Press, 1962.
    structure follows strategy — changes in strategy require changes in structure
  • Amy C. Edmondson. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018.
    safety and standards as independent axes; the learning zone
  • Andrew S. Grove. High Output Management. Random House, 1983.
    task-relevant maturity; managerial leverage; the one-on-one; the manager's output as the output of their organisation
  • Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy (editors). Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. O'Reilly Media, 2016.
    service-level objectives and error budgets; incident management; postmortem culture
  • Camille Fournier. The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. O'Reilly Media, 2017.
    the management career arc level by level; managing managers; ladders
  • Daniel H. Pink. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books, 2009.
    autonomy, mastery and purpose as the popular synthesis of self-determination research
  • Donald G. Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas Publishing, 2009.
    cost of delay; queues, utilisation and work in progress; batch size and variance
  • Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. Viking, 2014.
    truth, relationship and identity triggers; receiving feedback
  • Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership. Jossey-Bass, 1985.
    artifacts, espoused values and underlying assumptions
  • Frederick P. Brooks Jr.. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, 1975.
    adding people to a late software project makes it later
  • Geoffrey A. Moore. Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution. Portfolio, 2005.
    core versus context
  • John P. Kotter. Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
    the eight-step model of organisational change
  • John Whitmore. Coaching for Performance: GROWing People, Performance and Purpose. Nicholas Brealey, 1992.
    the GROW model
  • Kent Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
    sustainable pace (originally the forty-hour week)
  • Kim Scott. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. St. Martin's Press, 2017.
    care personally, challenge directly; ruinous empathy
  • L. David Marquet. Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. Portfolio / Penguin, 2012.
    intent-based leadership — "I intend to…" as a mechanism for pushing authority to where the information is
  • Lara Hogan. Resilient Management. A Book Apart, 2019.
    coaching managers and teams through change; sponsorship; the manager's own resilience
  • Martin Fowler. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Second Edition). Addison-Wesley, 2018.
    small behaviour-preserving improvements as ordinary work
  • Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press, 2019.
    team shapes and interaction modes; cognitive load; the platform team; Conway's law in practice
  • Max Landsberg. The Tao of Coaching: Boost Your Effectiveness at Work by Inspiring and Developing Those Around You. HarperCollins, 1996.
    the skill/will diagnostic and matrix
  • Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley and David White. The Alchemy of Growth: Practical Insights for Building the Enduring Enterprise. Perseus Books, 1999.
    the three horizons of a growth portfolio
  • Michael D. Watkins. The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels. Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
    the transition into a new role as its own work; early wins; integration
  • Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press, 2018.
    the DORA research programme; throughput and stability improve together; the four delivery metrics
  • Patrick Lencioni. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass, 2002.
    trust, conflict and commitment as a sequence; artificial harmony
  • Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. Prentice-Hall, 1969.
    the origin of situational leadership — style flexed to the follower's readiness on the task
  • Peter F. Drucker. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967.
    know where your time goes; put first things first
  • Peter M. Senge. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday, 1990.
    the learning organisation
  • Richard P. Rumelt. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Crown Business, 2011.
    the kernel of good strategy — diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action; the hallmarks of bad strategy
  • Scott E. Page. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton University Press, 2007.
    the formal argument that diverse heuristics outperform uniform ability on complex problems
  • Sloan R. Weitzel. Feedback That Works: How to Build and Deliver Your Message. Center for Creative Leadership Press, 2000.
    the situation–behaviour–impact feedback structure
  • Stephen R. Covey. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press, 1989.
    the urgent/important matrix as popularly framed
  • Steve McConnell. Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. Microsoft Press, 2006.
    the cone of uncertainty in its standard software form; ranges; decomposition
  • Tanya Reilly. The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change. O'Reilly Media, 2022.
    senior individual-contributor leadership; the source of "glue work"
  • Will Larson. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Stripe Press, 2019.
    organisational design and systems thinking at scale; sizing teams and managers' spans; hiring as a system
  • Will Larson. The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership. O'Reilly Media, 2024.
    writing an engineering strategy; the executive's operating rhythm
  • Will Larson. Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track. Stripe Press, 2021.
    the senior individual-contributor track and its archetypes

Papers

  • Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren and Michaela Greiler. DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity. ACM Queue, 21(2), 2023.
    the developer-experience framework — feedback loops, cognitive load, flow state
  • Alan MacCormack, Carliss Baldwin and John Rusnak. Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: The Mirroring Hypothesis. Research Policy, 41(8), 1309–1324, 2012.
    empirical test of Conway's observation — loosely coupled organisations produced more modular products
  • Alberto Bacchelli and Christian Bird. Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review. Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 712–721, 2013.
    review's benefits are knowledge transfer and awareness as much as defect finding; understanding the change is the central challenge
  • Amy C. Edmondson. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383, 1999.
    psychological safety defined and measured; its link to team learning
  • Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter. Understanding the Burnout Experience: Recent Research and Its Implications for Psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111, 2016.
    burnout as exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy, caused by job conditions
  • Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures. TIMS Studies in Management Science, 12, 313–327, 1979.
    the planning fallacy and the outside view (reference-class forecasting)
  • Edward L. Thorndike. A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25–29, 1920.
    the original description of the halo effect
  • Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter. The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274, 1998.
    meta-analysis of selection-method validity; structured interviews among the strongest predictors
  • Hal R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer. The Psychology of Sunk Cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140, 1985.
    prior investment increases the tendency to continue a course of action independent of its prospects
  • Hammond Pearce, Baleegh Ahmad, Benjamin Tan, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt and Ramesh Karri. Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot's Code Contributions. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022.
    a substantial share of assistant-generated code in security-relevant scenarios contained known vulnerability classes
  • Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand. McKinsey's Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited. Econ Journal Watch, 21(1), 2024.
    re-analysis finding the consultancy diversity–performance results do not replicate
  • Lisanne Bainbridge. Ironies of Automation. Automatica, 19(6), 775–779, 1983.
    automation leaves the human the hardest parts and erodes the skills needed to intervene
  • Marilyn Strathern. 'Improving Ratings': Audit in the British University System. European Review, 5(3), 305–321, 1997.
    the standard phrasing of Goodhart's law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
  • Martin S. Hagger, Nikos L. D. Chatzisarantis and 47 co-authors. A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546–573, 2016.
    the multi-laboratory replication that did not find the effect
  • Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying. Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165–218, 2015.
    randomised experiment — higher productivity and satisfaction at home, and a promotion penalty
  • Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang. Hybrid Working from Home Improves Retention without Damaging Performance. Nature, 630, 920–925, 2024.
    randomised trial of two days at home — no performance or promotion penalty, substantially better retention
  • Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck and Jenna Butler. The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There's More to It Than You Think. ACM Queue, 19(1), 2021.
    five dimensions of developer productivity; no single metric suffices
  • Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78, 2000.
    autonomy, competence and relatedness as the needs behind intrinsic motivation
  • Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven and Dianne M. Tice. Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265, 1998.
    the original ego-depletion claim
  • Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz. The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and Validation of a Measure for Assessing Recuperation and Unwinding from Work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221, 2007.
    detachment, relaxation, mastery and control as recovery experiences
  • Sida Peng, Eirini Kalliamvakou, Peter Cihon and Mert Demirer. The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot. arXiv preprint 2302.06590, 2023.
    controlled experiment; a defined task completed substantially faster with an AI coding assistant
  • Ward Cunningham. The WyCash Portfolio Management System. OOPSLA '92 Experience Report, ACM, 1992.
    the origin of the technical-debt metaphor

Reports

  • Ann Cavoukian. Privacy by Design: The 7 Foundational Principles. Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, 2009.
    privacy as the default, embedded in design
  • Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Elizabeth Barnes and David Rein (METR). Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), July 2025, 2025.
    randomised controlled trial; experienced developers in their own repositories were slower with AI tools while believing they were faster

Articles

  • David A. Garvin. How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management. Harvard Business Review, December 2013, 2013.
    the account of Google's internal study of its managers (Project Oxygen) and the behaviours that distinguished the best
  • Gary Klein. Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, September 2007, 2007.
    the pre-mortem technique
  • Jeff Bezos. 2015 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon.com, Inc.). Amazon.com, Inc., 2016.
    the "one-way door / two-way door" classification of decisions by reversibility
  • Jeff Bezos. 2016 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon.com, Inc.). Amazon.com, Inc., 2017.
    disagree and commit
  • John Allspaw. Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. Etsy, Code as Craft (engineering blog), 2012.
    the case for blameless incident reviews; the distinction between blamelessness and the absence of accountability
  • Julia Rozovsky. The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team. Google re:Work, 2015.
    Google's internal study of team effectiveness — psychological safety the strongest differentiator
  • Martin Fowler. TechnicalDebtQuadrant. martinfowler.com, 2009.
    debt as deliberate or inadvertent, prudent or reckless
  • Martin Fowler. StranglerFigApplication. martinfowler.com, 2004.
    incremental replacement of a legacy system by growing the new one around it
  • Melvin E. Conway. How Do Committees Invent?. Datamation, April 1968, 1968.
    the original statement that a system's structure mirrors the communication structure of the organisation that built it
  • W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy. Harvard Business Review, July–August 1997, 1997.
    engagement, explanation and expectation clarity as the elements of a process people accept