Customer Reviews

Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself (SEI Series in Software Engineering)

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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.

There are many books on Project Management, but few are on people management. Watts Humphrey is one of the originators of software development.

If you are at the point where you must start managing a project, then you must read this book.

Humphrey's experience is priceless. While programing languages may have changed, people have not.

Sales and marketing tend to over promise on delivery days, management wants to have as few people working as possible. Your coders each want to place their mark on the project.

This 'minefield' is revealed and strategies given to overcome the obstacles.

I have started down the path of managing teams and now feel I have another knowledge base to refer to before problems surface.

For those reflecting on the recent loss of Watts Humphrey, let me suggest that you read Reflections on Management, Watts final book.

Reflections on Management provides a comprehensive and effective prescription for how a boss should lead people in large-scale knowledge work including software. The management themes of commitment, planning, measuring, learning, leading, and teamwork are skillfully echoed throughout the book as mutually reinforcing tiles in a mosaic serving to lock-in the vision from every dimension.

Reflections is a six hour journey through six decades of profound, exciting, and often surprising insights gathered by software process pioneer and leader Watts Humphrey who experienced fixed point machines without floating point arithmetic that were programmed in assembly language in the `50's, managing IBM System/360 OS software development before there was a university computer science curriculum to supply a software workforce in the `60's, measuring the leading indicators of large scale software development accomplished with only rudimentary processes in the `70's, pioneering and innovating software process maturity and the means to convincingly assess it on a grand scale in the `80's, witnessing a software industry reveal itself to be primarily level 1 in software process maturity and then continuously improve towards level 2 and 3 in the `90's, and observing software process maturity expand to encompass systems engineering and program and acquisition management in the `00's. Watts Humphrey has altered the landscape of software engineering and changed the way software engineers look at themselves and shaped the expectations of managers and executives with respect to software and their role as managers in the development, deployment, and fielding of software systems.

Reflections arrived just in time to impact the next generation of software managers who are charged with the responsibility for an ever increasing software dependency within large-scale software intensive systems, but who appear content to employ ad hoc programming style in developing, deploying, and fielding software components, products, systems, and system of systems at a 3-Sigma level of quality. As a result, there is no shortage of defects from which bad actors compose exploits from which to launch Cyber Attacks.

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!