New software firms and groups are eager to get their products to market. Even small successes and few customers make these companies grow in size. Resources are usually tight, processes are light, lots of code is written for demos and new people are hired on all the time. In such an environment, it is easy to go astray fast, even for experienced people.This book identifies the things that make for a successful software development organization and provides some solutions and tools to successfully bootstrap a software development group and keep it running efficiently as it grows big. The individual ideas in the article have been tried and tested over many projects and in various companies. The book brings together these ideas in an easy to reference package, provides links to commonly used freeware and inexpensive tools. It also provides some guidelines on how common development practices can be tailored to suit specific needs.