Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers

Author: Steve McConnell List Price: $29.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0321193679 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (30 June, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 11,990 Average Customer Rating: 4.14 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

This book introduced me to Steve McConnell's Professional Development Ladder, a way of evaluating your current level of professionalism and learning what areas of knowledge you need in order to progress. It also talks about software engineer licensing (Texas does it), the newly accredited Software Engineering degree program (this replaces Computer Science in many respects), and the Software Engineering Institute's Code of Ethics and Professional Practice.

Many of these resources can be found around the Net, but this book neatly consolidates a lot of information. It also includes a lot of information (mainly statistics) I would not have found elsewhere, such as ROI's for specific software engineering practices (simply measuring productivity can return 150% in 12 months or 600% over 36 months, page 116), the exact makeup of the huge productivity gap between different developers (communication factors alone account for a 53% productivity difference, page 137), and an interesting and realistic diagram showing how professional licensing affects the pool of good and bad developers.

The roadmap extends all the way from the entry-level developer or new high-school graduate all the way up to industry leadership.

I give this book 5 stars not for the book alone but for it combined with the resources at McConnell's web site. If you want to excel in your field as a developer, these two taken together give a lot of great advice.

For many business people they feel that if you are not coding then you are not making progress, which is just plain wrong if you are in the early stages of a project. This often puts us (as project leaders) in the position of educating the client. This book is incredibly helpful for just such an endeavor. There are so many great points that I have used in helping me overcome the non-intuitive parts of development.

The statistics for our industry are abysmal (in terms of budgets over-runs, cancelled projects, etc.). If everyone read this book, and stopped coding for a few hours and actually THOUGHT more about the problem (especially for OO development - doing UML, CRC Cards or SOMETHING) in my opinion (after coding for 20 years - 13 of them professionally) our industry would be in much better shape. Even better would be if you can get your team using design patterns, pair programming (in many cases this is a good idea but not in all), agile development techniques, and other general 'best practices'.

I am constantly under pressure to code before it is appropriate to do so. It is hard to explain to a CEO that you need time to do what they believe is 'drawing pretty pictures'. However, reducing dependencies (and when you have them, making them dependent on abstract classes and/or interfaces NOT concrete implementation), not to mention model/view/controller type patterns are the difference between turning on a dime (say adding a web services API in a few weeks) or spending 6 months on a rewrite.

I cannot say enough good things about this book.

Kind Regards,
Damon Carr, CTO
Monetaire
www.monetaire.com

To realize the benefit of this book, you must actually Read The Book, which some of the other amazon reviewers have apparently not yet been able to fit into their busy schedules. The reviewer of 'examples of bad management' never read past the first section, which is called 'The Software Tarpit.' It is indeed about why projects are poorly managed, but it is only 55 pages out of 225. Sections 2, 3 & 4 contain abundant specific suggestions about how to meet schedules, budgets, and other project goals.

The reviewer of 'heavy on opinion, light on content' says he reads 5 books a day. The book has numerous notes at the end of each chapter, and is impressively well researched. I surmise this reviewer missed the 'content' during his speed reading.

The reading-impaired agile revolutionaries criticise the book for not discussing agile. This book also does not discuss object-oriented design, the Rational Unified Process, East Indonesian basket weaving, or the tooth fairie because those are different topics. Apparently some people think that every book should discuss agile, regardless of the book's topic.

This book is short, sweet, and to the point. It does not tell you how to debug your current project (see the author's Code Complete for that), but it will tell you how you and your organisation can improve in the long run. My company has already realised benefits from adopting the ideas in this book, and it is mandatory reading for programmers and managers.

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