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Software Project Survival Guide
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Author: Steve C McConnell
List Price: $24.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1572316217
Publisher: Microsoft Press (14 November, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 7,178
Average Customer Rating: 4.28 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Good but Light
This was good, but a little light. I have really liked the author's other works and so I expected a lot from this. Maybe that was part of it. I could not give this five stars because it was a little light on details, especially at the end. However, there is a lot of good project information here, from years of experience. Just the fact that it is not huge is a good thing -- too many 40-page books are turned into 600-page tomes so they give an aura of respectability.If you are new to software project management, this is an excellent book to start with (five stars). If you want to get a quick refresher on good ways to run a project, with some modern-day approaches, this is also good. Give it a try.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Easy read - for newcomers to the software project field.
Steve McConnell is better known for his two bestsellers - Rapid Development and Code Complete. While those two books are more detailed, this book has the necessary preliminary coverage of what it takes to make a software project succeed. It's a very easy book to read and can probably be read in a matter of a few hours. Steve assumes that the intended audience belongs to one of three groups of people - first group consists of 'top managers, executives, clients, investors, and end-user representatives', the second group consists of 'project managers', and the third group consists of 'technical leaders, professional developers, and self-taught programmers'. Or as he puts it 'anyone who has a stake in the software project's outcome'. But mostly he is assuming that you may not be exposed to many successful software project techniques and looking to rapidly get up to speed on a simple technique like the one outlined in this book. The book addresses projects that have team sizes between 3 and 25 and schedules of 3 to 18 months. The plan is supposed to work for various types of software systems like client-server or scientific but I didn't see web design projects mentioned explicitly. It could be because of the time this book was published. I plan on trying the techniques on a couple of non-critical web design projects and analyze the outcome. The book is 19 chapters, 250 pages and 4 sections. The four main sections are The Survival Mind-Set, Survival Preparations, Succeeding by Stages, and Mission Accomplished. The book starts out with a short welcome chapter on software project survival training and followed by another short chapter on assessing the state of your own project from a survival perspective (you take a test and get a score that indicates where your project is). The next three chapters focus on the survival concepts, survival skills, and the profile of a successful project. The book then goes into the core of how to make a software project succeed. This book is no substitute for the author's other book 'Rapid Development' though it is probably a good start if you aren't willing to cover the much larger book (other 600+ pages). Considering how few books have been written on software projects (that are not an exposition of SEI's CMM or the Rational Unified Process), I think this is a worthwhile book to read. At the bare minimum, it doesn't hurt to skim through the various topics and take away a good technique or two that you can immediately apply to your own software project. Good luck!
Rating: 2 out of 5
If you need to read this You're in the wrong business
No statment in this book is incorrect, or even inaccurate. The problem with it is it goes on and on about a number of simple, if not trivially obvious facts about how to manage a project. The main one which occupies hundreds of pages is "PLAN YOUR PROJECT".So if you could not have thought of these on your own, or ever did anything more complicated than playing tic-tac-toe without discovering this book's type of advice, you have no business managing a software project. However, if you skip all the obvious advice (averaging about 1/70 pages) and enjoy reading phrases like "Executive Sponsorship", "Mushy Milestones", and "inch pebbles" this book is for you. But please buy mine... cheap!
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