Recommended Books

Peter Senge brought the notion of a learning organization to us with The Fifth Discipline, and helped us understand how we could all work together to continuously improve as a group - the whole becomes a great deal more than the sum of the parts. When the practices in this book are embraced , any organization can drastically improve its effectiveness and competitiveness.

The Dance of Change clarifies and addresses the issues that Peter Senge found when bringing The Fifth Discipline into organizations. It is a great treatise for understanding the barriers to change that most organizations face, and exposes the mechanisms that need to be managed in order to sustain change and growth. Great insight!

Leading Strategic Change: Breaking Through the Brain Barrier: Of all the books on the market that discuss the topic of change, this one has come the closest so far to hitting the nail on the head. One of the key premises of the book is that “to change the organization, first change the individual”. The authors note (and I would agree from experience) that most change initiatives fail, and one of the primary root causes is that key individuals have not embraced the change sufficiently to see it through.

They provide a reasonable model for change that makes good sense and clarifies the challenges we may face as change agents, and walks through the potential pitfalls along the way with clear advice on how to mitigate these issues. This is an easy read and a very useful book.

It sounds like Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders sends a message that people are quite receptive to – selfless dissemination of knowledge and compassion wins out over fear and greed. Very inspirational speaker, I saw him in Seattle recently (easily 1/3 of the group lined up for copies of this book afterwards). You can check out his website for some videos of his chats. He’s a bit off the wall, which can be easier to take as a speaker than as a writer, but it’s a quick inspirational read nonetheless...

Getting to Yes is the classic guide to negotiation, from the Harvard Negotiation Project. It helps you recognize the pitfalls around most failed agreements, and shows you techniques for working with 'the other side' to arrive at that win-win position. A great deal of valuable advice in a small, easily read book.

In Getting Past No, William Ury picks up where he left off in Getting to Yes. Here, he recognizes that there will be times in negotiations where the other side really isn't interested in the win-win, and offers approaches to converting the relationship to one of co-operation.

On Writing Well is a great book that puts structure around a process that many people approach in an undisciplined fashion - communication with the written word. It is well laid out with great examples and insights into how to put an article, story, report, or book together with a lot less grief. For anyone that writes for a living, this is mandatory reading.

For those who provide advice to clients for a living, The Trusted Advisor by David Maister clearly explains that you are not likely to have a receptive audience until you have gained their trust. Once the point is made, it does dig deeper to provide guidance in how to gain that trust and retain it over the entire relationship with the client. As with anything that Maister has written, this is a super, insightful book.

Linked: The New Science of Networks: A very entertaining perspective of Network Theory as it exists today, and its ability to explain an extremely wide variety of phenomena, from human interaction to the Internet to biological processes. If you are involved with LinkedIn or any of the other social networking apps in vogue, this book will give you insights into why it behaves the way it does, and how to use that to your advantage.

Written by a former CIA analyst (for what that's worth) The Thinker's Toolkit walks through a number of different problem solving and decision making techniques that work for a wide variety of applications other than catching the bad guys. It is clearly laid out with plenty of examples, and can be used to help you arrive at a defendable answer to a difficult question that has a large number of complex challenges - it is vastly superior to rolling the dice!

How To Read a Book explains just that - reading a book for understanding or pleasure, scanning it in the bookstore to determine if you want to buy it, reading across an entire topic full of books for deep understanding of the topic. It is hard to believe that something we all take for granted can have such a rich disciplined approach, but this book covers the topic very well. At last look this was out of print, but it is well worth finding a copy.

Code Complete: Absolutely required reading for anyone that wants to be part of the software development game, this focuses on the implementation stage but puts it in a greater context of the remainder of the development lifecycle. Excellent set of checklists included that can be used as a basis for internal checklists to kickstart an organization's common understanding of how to do business. Originally tied to a companion website that has evolved to a commercial product (CX One) for Steve's company, Construx Software Builders.

Rapid Development : An excellent book that looks at software development from the project perspective, it provides an overview of best practices that have been collected over the years and presents them in an accessible form. The last half of the book is 27 mini-chapters, each briefly describing an acknowledged industry best-practice.

Constructing Superior Software is a collection of essays devoted to the breadth of issues in building high quality software systems. It addresses the system level, the design level, and the project level in one volume, and is produced by the Software Quality Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

eXtreme Programming Explained : The original book in what has become a long series of books on the latest trend in software development lifecycles. Still the best at describing the core of what XP is all about, should be required reading for anyone that thinks they are doing XP, or to understand what this is all about.

Software Requirements is a good book for covering the breadth of requirements engineering practices, and provides a strong survey of techniques that may be brought to bear on requirements challenges as the need arises. This second edition provides a great more detail over the first edition - more examples, more explanation, more depth. This book is the basis for Karl's extremely well received course In Search of Excellent Requirements, and has helped many organizations improve in this critical area of software development

In Agile Software Development Ecosystems, Jim Highsmith takes us on a tour of a variety of the 'new' approaches to software development that are loathed or loved by people that write software: eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Crystal Methods and others. This book is interesting in that Jim presents the structure of each of the approaches, and also exposes the motivation behind each by interviewing the original authors (the tables are turned as he is interviewed by Alistair Cockburn to describe his own Adaptive Software Development).

Agile Project Management is a strong presentation of a system of management practices that addresses one of the perceived downfalls of agile approaches – "how do you manage such a project?" We finally get a viable alternative to the misunderstood requirements/design/code waterfall model by acknowledging that in many projects a process of iterative, creative discovery where these things are activities rather than phases makes a lot more sense. The book brings process to the right level, with an emphasis on guiding principles and a few strong practices rather than a huge prescriptive approach that stifles innovation in the name of repeatability. Well structured and clear in its treatment, a superb addition to the Agile Software Development Series, I’m sure there will be more of this flavour to follow.

This book is not a pitch for a particular flavour of software development (though there are chapters that dissect eXtreme Programming and Alistair’s own Crystal Methods), but rather a dissection of team development along two lines: how people interact with one another and what is a methodology all about. For these alone, the book is worth its weight in gold. For anyone that is involved in the building or repairing of an approach for developing software, Agile Software Development will provide deep insights into why different elements would or would not work, as well as how all those elements hold together. While it’s full of many references and can at times be a challenge to wade through, it is definitely a worthwhile read.

Virtuoso Teams takes seven stories about leadership that are just about as diverse as could be – from Roald Amundsen’s conquest of the South Pole to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park facility to Sid Caesar’s comedy troupe – and distills a number of common attributes that have made each of these teams virtuoso in their fields. Not necessarily for the weak of heart, and at times making recommendations that would be counter to the notion of long-lived teams, the book captures the essence of what each of these teams leveraged for greatness. A fun and diverse read, with a distillation of team practices at the end that can be used to kick-start your own Virtuoso Team.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is simply a great book. It starts out by discussing how Hush Puppies suddenly became more popular, then meanders all over the place: from crime in New York to the ‘stickiness’ of kids TV shows to our attempts to get people to quit smoking, it describes the mechanisms that play in getting things to happen – to get them past the tipping point. A very readable and insightful book.

True Professionalism takes a collection of essays from David Maister and builds them into a cohesive treatise on professionalism, from the perspectives of yourself, your firm, and your clients. Leaning heavily on the notion of ethical behaviour, it is provides a lot of food for thought about your practices, and the practices of those around you.

There are too few books that adequately address the issues surrounding team dynamics of software development organizations. Karl Wiegers' first book, Creating a Software Engineering Culture does a good job at exposing the challenges and identifying solutions for building a great team. Very accessible and well laid out. Might be tough to find in the stores, which is too bad - it deserves more coverage than it has had.

Software Project Survival Guide: Steve McConnell's third book, and a great book to hand to managers to help them understand the breadth of proper practices in software development in an accessible manner. No deep new insights, but a good summary of what should be done. Has actually been used as a process guide in some organizations, which is quite a bit of a stretch.

The Essential Drucker distils 60 years of experience into an extremely powerful collection of essays and articles about management and professionalism. Though some of the examples are a bit dated in articles from 50 years ago, the principles and insights captures remain as valid today as they were originally. This book provided amazing insights even before the preface was completed!

Debugging the Development Process provides Steve Maguire's spin on how to manage software teams to produce high quality code on schedule. Based on his experience at Microsoft, It gives good insight into team dynamics and challenges that can hit a team that is pushing hard to deliver, and sustain them from project to project. A good read.

In Managing the Professional Services Firm, David Maister provides excellent advice on setting up and maintaining a group of professionals. Based on his experience with legal firms, it is just as applicable to other service-based groups, especially those in the technology field. While perhaps too rich for individual consultants, there is still value in recognizing all the issues and the approach for managing them effectively.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk: A good introduction to the nature of risk and how society has evolved to a point where we can manage risk and recognize it as both challenge and opportunity. It gets into the technical details, but still written for the popular press.

Cool Time: A Hands-on Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time : I’ve been conscious about personal efficiency for some time, and have worked to train groups on how to best organize their time through appropriate balancing of activities, but I still learned a great deal with this book. Steve goes beyond the standard ‘Touch it Once’ and ‘Do-Defer-Delegate-Dump’ suggestions, and clearly describes how to take control of your day so that you can be much more effective. An easy read with specific advice, the best value that I’ve found (beyond the ‘standard stuff’ that was already in place) was to explicitly plan time for me within my day, and to set and manage expectations with others so that this time is truly mine. By far the best resource in the genre that I have read.

Philip Crosby's Quality is Free is one of the classics that captures the essence of quality management for organizations (rather than the superficial end-of-process quality control that most software organizations practice). This is the basis of a lot of thinking that has gone on in this area over the past 25 years, and is a great foundation to start from.

A Discipline for Software Engineering is Watts Humphrey's guidance for approaching the Personal Software Process. On first glance it could easily be dismissed as a theoretical text, but give it a good read. The Personal Software Process is an extremely well thought out approach for helping software practitioners understand their capabilities, and this book thoroughly captures this in clear, extremely detailed form. This serves as the text for undergrad level courses in the PSP and is structured to fit in a standard curriculum size, but there are many that would gain tremendous value from learning what this book and the PSP can teach about individual performance.

Testing Computer Software does a good job of covering the breadth of the software testing spectrum while still diving down into sufficient detail to provide some meat that you can really sink your teeth into. It has a small section on printer testing and dives deeply into localization testing, but the greatest value likely comes from the comprehensive appendix that describes a wide variety of common software errors.

Despite its age, I think that Glenford J. Myers' book, The Art of Software Testing, is still one of the strongest available to give you a strong basis for this very difficult art. From the opening exercise that really opens your eyes to the complexity of thorough testing, through discussion of equivalence cases and other solid principles for testing, it is indeed a classic. Might be tough to find these days, but well worth the hunt.

Automated Software Testing presents a structured approach for designing and executing testing (the Automated Test Lifecycle Methodology). This approach covers the breadth of automated test practices, and addresses such issues as planning, team dynamics, reuse, and most importantly, the acquisition of management support for such an initiative.