books:

	Debugging the Development Process : Practical Strategies for Staying Focused, Hitting Ship Dates, and ... Steve Maguire, 1994 - 183 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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Maguire gives some simple, practicle advice for improving the development environment that a manager is responsible for. For example, he recommends starting each day by asking, "What can I do today that will help keep the project on track for the next few months?"

I also found the section on feedback loops to be interesting. The suggestion that you have a person stop feature work to fix a bug that they created as soon as it is found is a way to emphasize quality and make it in the best interest of developers to produce high quality code.

The chapter on attitudes is also very good. Much of the time, there isn't a lot knowledge wise that separtes good and bad developers. The difference comes in attitude. Attitudes such as, "We can't do that!", "The users won't care!", "Bugs are going to happen!" need to be rooted out.

This book gives good insight as to what you as a manager can do and help your developers do in order to have smoother projects that are high quality and on time.

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Good advice for software development teams

This book makes lots of good points about the software development process. Steve's ideas ring true based on my past experience with more companies than I like to think about. Although the ideas are somewhat obvious if one thinks about them, I found it amazing how many companies ignore these 'obvious' ideas. The most impressive ideas I found in this book pertain to meeting schedules without brow beating to the point where people with hard earned experience leave the organization simply because they're driven into the ground.


Good book

This book is great if you are managing software engineers (or are one being led).

I highly recommend it!

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A feel-good management book

Maguire's book is a very gentle handbook to guiding software projects. Relatively light and fast-paced, it can be read in just a few hours. His insights and tips about team management are definitely helpful, but my feeling is that he never attacks the difficult problems of management.

In a nutshell, his advice is to 1) free up the engineers' time by reducing unnecessary paperwork, 2) eliminate any unnecessary features, 3) slip ship dates to ensure quality, and 4) increasing training for under-performing engineers. He advises against 1) adding extra engineers when the project looks to be in trouble, 2) forcing engineers to work long hours to hit ship dates, 3) schedule development activities without a clear milestone plan in mind, and 4) holding on to superstar engineers who need room to grow.

These ideas are very good, of course. It's important to keep engineers from being overworked and to keep product quality as high as possible. But there is a limit to how far Maguire's tips can take you.

Schedule slips and dropped features seem like an easy thing to do when you're just talking about it, but what can you do when the command comes down from the upper echelons of management that you must ship or die trying? Maguire does get one thing right on this count, he describes teams where a third of the engineers (the best ones, of course) quit the company after the project completes.

What happens when an engineer is severely underperfoming and is holding the team back? Continue providing that person training? Maguire's teams, luckily for him, are made up of well-trained, highly focused engineers who, given the chance, can work on a product for 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, Maguire does not even approach the topic of terminating bad employees for the good of the team. A discussion of this, including how the team benefits overall from the firing, as well as how it may have unintended psychological effects on the rest of the team, would have been appreciated.

After reading this book, you'll come away with a new energy towards leading your team. You will see every problem as something easily conquered with just the right amount of finesse and encouragement. Maguire gives valuable tips to help overcome many problems that plague projects, and many of these work well. But this isn't the book to end all management books.

In a sense, it is a "Tony Robbins" guide for managers. It gets you pumped up, gives you some tools, and puts you in the right right frame of mind. I like to reread Debugging the Development Process when I need that recharge, but it is not the book I go to when I need to deal with real problems.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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