Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself
- ISBN13: 9780321711533
- Condition: New
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Product Description
“Whether you are in a startup or Fortune 500 company; are a developer, development manager, or CEO; use agile, lean, waterfall, or other methodology–if software and quality are important to you, you should read and pay attention to Watts’s reflections.”
–Bill Ihrie, Former SVP & CTO, Intuit
“You will enjoy this collection for its down to earth, accessible prose, its pragmatism, optimism, and, above all, Watts’s demonstration that software quality improvement is vitally important and very achievable.”
–Aidan Waine, Information Solutions General Manager, Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division
“Watts has developed a real weapon for beating your competition: a reliable, repeatable way to create software that has excellent quality and reduces the time to deliver it to your customer and lowers the cost of the entire software life cycle and improves employee morale. All at the same time!”
–Michael J. Cullen, Vice President, Quality, Oracle Communications Global Business Unit
A Lifetime of Invaluable Management Insights from Legendary Software Quality Guru Watts S. Humphrey
In 1986, Watts S. Humphrey made an outrageous commitment: a promise to transform software development. As the pioneering innovator behind SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Personal Software Process (PSP), and Team Software Process (TSP), Humphrey has more than met that promise. But his contributions go beyond methodology: For decades, his deeply personal writings on project management have been admired by software engineers worldwide.
Reflections on Managementbrings together Humphrey’s best and most influential essays and articles-sharing insights that will be indispensable for anyone who must achieve superior results in software or any other endeavor.
Collected here for the first time, these works offer compelling insights into everything from planning day-to-day work to improving quality, encouraging teamwork to becoming a truly great leader.
All of these writings share a powerful vision, grounded by a life in software that has extended across nearly six decades. The vision is this: To succeed, professionals must effectively manage far more than plans, schedules, and code-they must manage teams, bosses, and above all, themselves.
Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself
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Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself provides new project managers with specific advice on how to manage projects and teams alike. Chapters pack in positive gems that reflect on motivators, noticing team interactions, and more, and provide a positive survey for any software project engineer or management team. A top pick for business and computer collections alike!
Rating: 5 / 5
The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) have been major forces in software development for at least 20 years. Along with those, the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP) have also been applied to help make software projects more predictable and manageable.
This book is a collection of essays and articles written by Watts Humphrey, the man who was the influence and drive behind these models and processes. I found this book to be an interesting journey through the thinking of Humphrey as he clearly and rationally outlines the “why” behind the “what.” Then, he describes “how” to do the work of managing intellectual and creative people which have to work together to deliver a technical product – on time, within budget, with the right features and with quality.
There are many gems in this very readable book (a great airplane book), such as:
* Defects are Not Bugs
* The Hardest Time to Make a Plan is When You Need it Most
* Everyone Loses With Incompetent Planning
* Every New Idea Starts as a Minority of One
* Projects Get into Trouble at the Very Beginning
This book is divided into four parts:
1. Managing Your Projects
2. Managing Your Teams
3. Managing Your Boss
4. Managing Yourself
If you are a software project manager, test manager, or test team leader who has to fight the battles involved in getting a project completed within time, budget, scope and quality targets, you will find this book of immense value. Or, you might buy it as a gift for your manager who just doesn’t get what’s so hard about software development.
Although this book is a collection of essays, it flows very well and reads like it was written as one book. By the way, I felt the Epilogue was excellent – don’t skip it.
If there are any doubts about the credibility factor of this book, the advance praise at the front of the book spans four pages and reads like a “who’s who” of software development: Steve McConnell, Ed Yourdon, Ron Jeffries, Walker Royce, Capers Jones, Victor Basili, Lawrence Putnam and Bill Curtis, to name a few.
Whether you are fully immersed in the agile project world, or following the CMMI, or just trying to figure out the best way to plan, conduct and manage software projects, this is a book worth reading and taking to heart. In the advance praise, Ron Jeffries writes, “I’ve followed Watts Humphrey’s work for as long as I can remember. I recall, in my youth, thinking he was asking too much. Now that I’m suddenly about his age, I realize how many things he has gotten right. This collection from his most important writings should bring these ideas to the attention of a new audience: I urge them to listen better than I did.”
Amen, Ron, amen.
Rating: 5 / 5