Exploring Extreme Programming
One Page Management, Riaz Khadem and Robert Lorber, Quill, 1998. This is clearly in the One Minute Manager family of books, and shares their style of having a good nugget of information wrapped in a story you can read in Continue reading Review – One-Page Management
The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management, Tom DeMarco, Dorset House, 1997. A thought experiment in novel form: what would happen if we could run the same project multiple ways in a project management laboratory? The main character keeps a Continue reading Review – The Deadline
Dynamics of Software Development, Jim McCarthy. Microsoft Press, 1995. Rules of thumb from a key player on the Visual C++ team: how to ship great software on time. Similar in tone to The Pragmatic Programmer, but aimed more at managers Continue reading Review – Dynamics of Software Development
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins. HarperCollins, 2001. Collins and his team set criteria for how to identify a good company that became great (a transformation sustaining value substantially above its industry). Continue reading Review – Good to Great
Quality Software Management, Volume 2: First-Order Measurement, Gerald M. Weinberg, Dorset House, 1997. First-order measurement is the use of back-of-the-envelope calculations sufficient for building something. Weinberg relates Satir’s interaction model (intake, meaning, significance, and response) to software management. The author Continue reading Review – Quality Software Management, vol. 2: First-Order Measurement
One way to look at XP is to consider the conversations it involves. Continue reading Extreme Programming as Nested Conversations
Managing the Design Factory, Donald Reinertsen. Free Press, 1997. Reinertsen comes at managing design from the manufacturing product development side, but a lot of his tools seem appropriate for software product development as well. “When we begin a design we Continue reading Review – Managing the Design Factory
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox. North River Press, 1992 (2nd rev. edition). A combination love story and manufacturing treatise. Inventory and high utilization are signs of sub-optimizing the whole system. (Reviewed Dec., ’02)
First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals, Patrick J. McKenna and David H. Maister. Free Press, 2002. While targeted at group leaders in professional practices (e.g., legal firms), this book has a lot to teach coaches and Continue reading Review – First Among Equals
The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving, Morgan D. Jones. Three Rivers Press, 1995. Tools and exercises for helping you analyze problems, including problem restatement, decision trees, matrices, ranking, hypothesis testing, and utility analysis. (Reviewed Dec., ’02)