software_development

Leading a Software Development Team: A developer's guide to successfully leading people & projects
$39.99
This is one of the best books I have ever read on software development period. There are too many books on software development dealing with a specific technology that, after several months, become useless (or nearly so). There are surprizingly few books dealing with less ephemeral topics on software development. Books such as Peopleware, Death March, etc. are different than most software development books in that they take up topics that are more or less unchanging. There are certain tools and techniques that apply to how you lead a software team that are true regardless of whether you are using C# or C, developing a web app or embedded software, etc. This book does an outstanding job of capturing these kinds of truths and it does so in a highly pragmatic way offering a treasure of truly excellent actionable advice.

I rank this book up there with Peopleware, Death March and Code Complete. A really great classic on software development!

Dynamics of Software Development (Best Practices)
$39.99
I have not found this book as interesting as the type of books that I usually read. I prefer books dealing with the more technical aspects of software development. I have read this book because I need to acquire a solid base of knowledge on software project management and not because the topics covered in the book seemed fun and interesting to me. Even if I was not very enthusiast to read it, I must confess that the author made a great job making his book interesting to read by interleaving important concepts with anecdotes from his work experience.

This book is divided into 54 short advices each taking 1 to few pages to expand the rational behind the advice. This is a format that I like and the advices that I have preferred were the ones dealing with the psychological aspect of software development. An example of such rule is that software quality is the mirror of the state of mind of the team. For some this might be obvious but considering the book intended readers which consist of engineers and software professionals, the author has been wise to be explicit on this topic in my opinion as from experience, human interactions is usually not the strongest skill among developers.

The part that seems to me to be outdated is the whole proposed economical model to market software. The author advocates that to make money from software, you must release often like every year and by doing so, your customers will be so happy that they will gladly hand you more money year after year. I think this model used to be true when the software industry was still young 20 years ago but in 2008, the software products are so mature that no matter how hard you try to squeeze more new features, it will not be enough to justify for people to purchase the new version when that last one does everything you want. You just have to think about the sales of Windows Vista or Microsoft Office 2007 to see what I mean. Changing just for the sake of changing does not sell.

In my opinion this model should be changed to one where incremental small evolutions are proposed to customers. I would be willing to pay a small amount of money every year for an OS that is smaller, better and faster at each version. I do not get it how software companies can expect people to be interested in slower and more bloated products than the previous version. Add the possibility to purchase inexpensive add-ons to fill very specific needs to the model and you have a very attractive model. I am not sure if what I would like to see is representative to what the typical customer expects or if my proposal is viable in real life but one thing is sure. The model proposed in the book does not seem to work anymore for many mature businesses.

There is a 2006 edition of this book. I might take a look in it to find out if the advices that I have found outdated have been reworked.

Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
$35.00
To take advantage of the pearls & jewels of wisdom packed into this book, you have to already have the discipline to avoid making the classic mistakes (which McConnell conveniently lists) and know & apply software development fundamentals (which McConnell also conveniently lists).

Head First Software Development
$49.99
I looked through this book online using Amazon and some of the pages looked of interest to me as I am working with some new teams who have not used Agile before and there were parts of this books (mainly around user stories) which got my attention.

I have been developing for 25 years and have been managing Agile teams over the last 4 years, recently using Scrum as the framework of choice. I was looking for some further material to expand my knowledge base and having read Head First Design Patterns (highly recommended) I thought this book would fit my needs.

For me, I was dissapointed. I read this book basically cover-to-cover in about 3 hours and there were aspects which made me think, on the whole there was nothing new in this book and the topics it did cover it did not go into any real depth. For me, not a good use of my money.

However, as a book to get my team and future teams who are new to Agile, Test First, Continuous Integration, Version Control, Unit Testing, User Stories, etc, this book is great and I do recommend it.

The Head First series of books take the reader on a simple journey. Nothing complex or where there is something complex they de-complex it and in some ways dumb it down to a reasonably low common-denominator. This means just about anyone can read this book and should understand the concepts and principles in it. I plan to provide this to some non-technical BA's who I work with and other than the section on Unit Testing know that they will be able to read this, digest it, and understand the principles and then hopefully use them within our organisation.