Q5. How did you two work together when writing? Are you geographically close? Oh, and how did the two of you meet? And how and when did you decide to write a book together?
Shane and I have been friends for several years. We both live in Portland and we usually see each other once or twice a week. (A bunch of us like to get together and play German-style board games like Settlers of Catan.) He also works for O'Reilly and has written several books, including the XP Pocket Guide, so naturally I thought of him when I wanted to write my first book. Originally, my thought was that I could get my feet wet by updating his Pocket Guide for Kent Beck's 2nd edition XP book. It would be a way for me to learn more about the world of book publishing without investing too much time or effort. (How's that for an iterative approach?)
Of course, it didn't work out that way! We ended up creating a completely different book, and it took a huge amount of time and effort. I couldn't be more thrilled with how it's turned out, though. The feedback has been almost universally positive.
In terms of how we worked together, we actually applied a lot of agile principles to working on the book as well. I only wish we had done more. We set up a Subversion repository for the book and wrote it using a markup language that we "built" using a Perl script. We had a master chart that showed every section of the book, who was working on what, and how far along it was. I kept a burn-down chart, too. And of course we tried to involve as many "customer representatives" as we could to review the book and we posted sections for feedback as soon as they were completed, about once per week.
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