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Beyond Chaos: The Expert Edge in Managing Software Development
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Author: Larry L. Constantine, Larry Constantine
List Price: $29.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201719606
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (15 January, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 208,961
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Great thought-invokers
This book, consisting of short essays, had been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time. Finally, I picked it up when my summer vacation started and I actually felt sorry I hadn't done it earlier. Constantine and others present their thoughts about common problems in software development organizations and some methods to tackle these issues with. I keep nodding and sighing while reading the problem descriptions and keep on nodding as the authors proceed to how they have successfully solved the problems before. Good stuff!
Rating: 4 out of 5
A Must Have For Team Leaders
I bought this book when I was promoted to team leader 6 months ago. This is a great collection of wisdom for the new manager, especially Chapter 7 - First Things First: A Project Manager's Primer. As this chapter says from the start, most people are promoted without much if any training. This is a good starting point. The close of the book - Chapter 45 - was also one of the highlights. This is Constantine's advice to new leaders and those who wish to become leaders. He makes a nice distinction between pure management, to which he claims to have nothing new to add, and leading software development.The book is broken down into 6 areas (It's About People, Project Management, Under Pressue, Quality Required, Processes and Practices, and Leadership and Teamwork) each containing about 8 chapters. You may think that is a lot of ground to cover in a book, and it is. The chapters in Quality Required didn't seem to be as relavent to their area as the others did. Quality means a lot of different things to a lot of different people so this is difficult no doubt. I found the firt two and last two areas of the book to be the most helpful. This may seem contradictory to the above paragraph, but I felt the book was too long. Compared to other books such as "The Manager Pool" and "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering", this book is hard to finish in short bursts. Five pages was about tops for a chapter in the other books while it was typically the minimum for this book. That doesn't make Beyond Chaos a bad book. As I've said it has great information. Just don't expect to breeze through the information.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Great for browsing or as a straight read
Having been in the software development business for many years, I have experienced most of the situations that are described in this instructive series of essays. The writers of the articles in the book and the editor, Larry Constantine, are all long time practitioners in the field and bring share deep experience level with entertaining case studies and solid advice. Although some of the ideas are somewhat idealistic (programmers forming an international software guild to enforce standards), others are practical and immediately useful. Even if, for you, some of the articles are "preaching to the choir", they may give you a different way to explain something you may already be doing, or help with additional justification for using an approach that many managers of the "ready, fire, aim" school of management don't see the need for. This not to say that this is one of those "heavy methodology" books; it isn't. It is disheartening when you see organizations make the same mistakes over and over. Readers of this book may be able to use some of the techniques described to keep their particular organization out of trouble. This book is an excellent and readable contribution to software development and software development management.
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