Book Description
Any software project that's worth starting will be vulnerable to risk. Since greater risks bring greater rewards, a company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition.
By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes—in the name of positive thinking or a Can-Do attitude—software managers drive their organizations into the ground.
In Waltzing with Bears, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister—the best-selling authors of Peopleware—show readers how to identify and embrace worthwhile risks. Developers are then set free to push the limits.
You'll find that risk management
* makes aggressive risk-taking possible
* protects management from getting blindsided
* provides minimum-cost downside protection
* reveals invisible transfers of responsibility
* isolates the failure of a subproject.
Readers are taught to identify the most common risks faced by software projects:
* schedule flaws
* requirements inflation
* turnover
* specification breakdown
* and under-performance.
Packed with provocative insights, real-world examples, and project-saving tips, Waltzing with Bears is your guide to mitigating the risks—before they turn into problems.
Customer Reviews:
Very usefull.......2007-01-15
The book comes in handy, at a time where we are facing quite some challenges in a large IT project.
Common Sense advice for Project management.......2006-10-23
At a certain fundamental level, projects are about how well one manages the risks in the process of achieving the project objectives. Projects by their very nature and scope of effort entails some level of risk (major or minor), but unfortunately the concept of recognizing and managing the risks is sorely absent in majority of IT projects. And for those of us who have been involved in IT projects, this book is a stark reminder of how poorly risks are managed.
I found this book very useful in understanding the thought process behind risk management and more importantly the challenges and difficulties in implementing them. I have seen projects where Risk management is nothing more than symbolic maintenance of a risk log, which is more "CYA", than anything practically useful. Ofcourse, many other projects don't even maintain this token log too.
There are some striking observations in this book, which is commonsense, but gets lost in the thicket of our daily project management duties.
One of them is about the project delays:
"When a project strays from schedule, it's seldom because the work planned just took longer than anyone had thought; a much more common explanation is that the project got bogged down doing work that wasn't planned at all.
Most software project managers do a reasonable job of predicting the tasks that have to be done and a poor job of predicting the tasks that might have to be done."
Another one is about schedule estimates:
"Software managers have tended to follow a standard rule: The Estimate and the goal are identical. The discipline of risk management though will counsel you to use goals as you always have to help people strive for best performance. At the same time, it will prompt you to use a very different planning estimate when making promises to your clients and management.
Schedule = Goal = N -> Really dumb equation
Schedule > Goal > N -> Sensible (N =Nano-estimate)"
THis is so true. It always happens that whatever is the earliest
articulated date of completion automatically is considered the deadline, which is most of the time unrealistic and working against this timeline makes risk management even more impossible.
I woulf recommend this book to anyone intrested in reading about some common sense advice related to IT project management in general and Risk management in particular.
A necessity for *developers*.......2006-10-01
Read this unsystematic and occasionally glib book (I concede this point to other reviewers) and you will suddenly realize that you, your colleagues in development, your technical leads, and your CEO have probably all been lying to yourselves and to each other about every single "milestone". Risk analysis is not merely done badly most of the time. It's usually not done at all. I learned enough from this book on a Sunday to return to work the next day and successfully persuade my colleagues that our project plan was worthless, and we needed to come up with a new one *now* that properly took account of the risks. No, I'm not a risk analyst, but merely the effort of thinking about risk in a different way had a payoff. Before this, we were just driving blind.
This is the resource you need in your toolkit to stop the glazed eye syndrome?.......2006-05-19
Hardly. I'm not sure what the definitive source on risk managment for software projects is, but this isn't it. Not even a good primer.
Doubletalk, Optimism, and Magic.......2006-01-25
As far as I can tell, this book is driven by doubletalk, optimism, and magic.
DOUBLETALK:
Always take risks, we are told, because projects without risk don't have enough benefit. (A glib assertion, but.. OK.) Then we are told that we should never evade a risk - that is, we should never leave anything up to chance. In the middle here and there, we are told that risks won't go away. And finally, we are told that showstoppers are managed by promoting such risks to project assumptions with ceremonies... that evidently banish evil possibilities. The intent is to give managers the impression that they can take macho keen risks while controlling everything.
Sorry Guys. You can look both ways twice, but every time you cross the street, you stand a chance of losing your life. Deal with it.
OPTIMISM:
Those risk diagrams. The wonderful thing about them is that... they're bounded! Ya know what? I'd kill for one of those! Project Management might actually work for software development then! A bounded risk isn't a risk at all; it's a certainty with the possibility of coming in early in front of it.
Gee, Guys! Many of my risk diagrams are lognormal - and they come from histograms of historical data. You didn't cover those.
And finally there's the
MAGIC: Aside from the banishing rituals, there's the simulator based on magical industry averages. Wherever the data come from, and whatever it does, it doesn't have a large enough sample to make a stable... pie chart.
But that's just it. The book is great for pie chart mentalities, and every moment they spend reading it, they're staying out of my way.
Average customer rating:
- Does what it should do
- Well organized, competent but uninspired and biased
- Excellent resource for programmers
- Nice book; available on the net for free
- Good Overview
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Managing Projects with GNU Make (Nutshell Handbooks)
Robert Mecklenburg
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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ASIN: 0596006101 |
Book Description
The utility simply known as make is one of the most enduring features of both Unix and other operating systems. First invented in the 1970s, make still turns up to this day as the central engine in most programming projects; it even builds the Linux kernel. In the third edition of the classic Managing Projects with GNU make, readers will learn why this utility continues to hold its top position in project build software, despite many younger competitors. The premise behind make is simple: after you change source files and want to rebuild your program or other output files, make checks timestamps to see what has changed and rebuilds just what you need, without wasting time rebuilding other files. But on top of this simple principle, make layers a rich collection of options that lets you manipulate multiple directories, build different versions of programs for different platforms, and customize your builds in other ways. This edition focuses on the GNU version of make, which has deservedly become the industry standard. GNU make contains powerful extensions that are explored in this book. It is also popular because it is free software and provides a version for almost every platform, including a version for Microsoft Windows as part of the free Cygwin project. Managing Projects with GNU make, 3rd Edition provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects. Also added are a number of interesting advanced topics such as portability, parallelism, and use with Java. Robert Mecklenburg, author of the third edition, has used make for decades with a variety of platforms and languages. In this book he zealously lays forth how to get your builds to be as efficient as possible, reduce maintenance, avoid errors, and thoroughly understand what make is doing. Chapters on C++ and Java provide makefile entries optimized for projects in those languages. The author even includes a discussion of the makefile used to build the book.
Customer Reviews:
Does what it should do.......2007-07-02
I've used make and makefiles for many years. In my current product development there was suddenly a need for a little more than the standard make knowledge. For most Open Source tools there is a good O'reilly book, so I grabbed this one from the store.
This book exactly fitted to my need. It does what it should do, it explain make, and nothing more. Already after part 1 I got useful new bits of information. Nothing major, just small "ah-ha, that's how the do it"'s.
The book is structured ok (I felt it could be structured better, but have no suggestion how). It consists of basic and advanced parts. The basic part will cover rules, variables, functions and commands. The advanced will talk about large project, C++, Java, examples and some debugging.
All the basic concepts chapters were pretty good. Somehow I didn't enjoy the advanced chapters too much. I didn't feel I was learning much new things there. The Java chapter was a little odd. I've not met any Java developer who currently uses make, most have switched to ant quite some time ago (book was 2004, so might be changed in the fourth edition). The example makefile of the book was somehow not interesting. The second example makefile was the linux kernel. This was more interesting, but it didn't go into too much details.
All in all, I found it a good book. It gave me exactly what I needed. Somehow the writing style was a little dry. I couldn't really point my finger on what made it so.
I'll give it 3 stars. Not because it's not good, but exactly because it's a good book. However, it didn't give me something extra, which I always hope a book gives me.
Recommended when needing to know more about Make :)
Well organized, competent but uninspired and biased.......2007-06-25
Mr. Mecklernburg is definitely an expert in GNU Make and the book shows it. The information it contains is well organized and the author doesn't spend precious time on non-essentials.
The downsize of the book consists in the total lack of fun it produces. The reader has no joy while learning about make and he may quickly find himself yawning at pages and pages of explanations with little or no examples that smooth out the learning curve.
The book seems as if the author tried to show off his knowledge with the best eficiency per page and in the smallest number of pages. He succeeded, at least with me: I am convinced that Mr. Mecklenburg is an excellent engineer but a terrible teacher.
Besides the content not being enjoyable, it is so much biased towards *nix that the Windows programmer righfully asks himself "what about me"? The solution offered by Mr. Mecklenburg for Windows consists in the... Cygwin environment. I'll abstain from commenting on this suggested choice.
Despite its drawbacks, the programmer may find enough material to learn from it and get the job done. But make no mistake: this is not a feat and you'll need quite some determination to finish this book and extract something useful out of it.
Excellent resource for programmers.......2007-06-15
Make has been an icon in the GNU / Linux world for over thirty years now, and continues to be one of the most used utilities to ever be released on the platform. A good number of other projects have risen to take its place as an automated-build utility, but as of yet, none have been able to unseat Make. Some see Make as being too arcane and finicky to survive in the once it is confronted with an advanced, user-friendly, utility of the same purpose. However, as it stands now, Make is still the standard in the `industry', and Makefiles are distributed with almost every major software package on the GNU / Linux platforms (as well as some others!).
Any avid Linux or UNIX power user, as well as most system administrators, will need to have some knowledge of Make to do what they need. Programmers, on the other hand, need to have an intimate knowledge of Make, Makefiles, and what the abilities of Make are. This book is more for the latter group, and goes into detail that the former group probably doesn't need to know too much about. For the former group, I would suggest a more concise, simplified version of this book. For the programmers, this book is a must-have.
As I mentioned before, Make can be a little finicky at some points. This, some may say, is an understatement. There are a number of "gotcha's" in the language, as well as a lot of `hackish' features (when I say `hackish', think Perl `hackish'). Perhaps, more importantly, however, there are a lot of fairly advanced features that Make can handle, and few people seem to use these. This is where the book really shines - it goes over the rarely-seen, but perhaps some of the most advanced features, of the Make utility.
This might seem obvious to most, but the novel assumes that the reader has previous programming experience, and throws C++ code blocks at the reader on the third page of the first chapter. If you don't have any programming experience, you probably shouldn't be reading this book anyways - but I thought it worth mentioning.
The primary content of the book is split into two sections - basic topics, and then the more advanced topics. The author does an excellent job of starting out with the absolute basics, and slowly progressing into the more advanced topics at an easy-to-follow pace. I never felt like the pace was too fast, and the author does an excellent job of giving examples for each of the topics that require one. Each example is explained in detail, with an added bonus of a few "what-ifs" at some points.
In fact, this leads into one of my few complaints with the book. There is so much code, and so much text, and... well... nothing else. There are maybe a dozen and a half pages in the book that aren't just one big solid block of text. After a while, it becomes hard to take. It doesn't help that each page looks almost exactly the same, so after a while, things start to kind of bleed together. In the next edition, it would be nice to maybe see some page styling, new layouts, some more images / tables where possible, maybe some funny side anecdotes or something - *anything* to give the text some life.
Once you accept the pedantry of the text, you will find that it is extremely well written, and easy to understand. There were very few instances in which I had to re-read something multiple times to get an understanding of what was being communicated, and the author's ability to describe even complex topics in simple terms is really impressive at some points.
The advanced sections of the book delve into some topics that I didn't expect to see, and was honestly pleasantly surprised that they made their way into the text. Included in the list of `surprise topics' are alternatives to Make, benchmarking Make, parallel Make, distributed Make, third-party programs that work with Make to add new functionality, and even sections on Cygwin and Make.
Also in the advanced partition of the book were two other sections that I found to be extremely helpful, if not essential: Debugging Makefiles, and Example Makefiles. The Example Makefiles chapter includes both excellent Makefile examples as well as discussion of what is happening in them. The Debugging Makefiles chapter goes over a lot of the "gotcha's" in the language, how to find a problem, and then possible fixes for it. These were both nice touches to the book, and are examples of the dedication the author shows to covering the more difficult parts of the language.
For the purposes of an in-depth, complete tutorial in Make, this book succeeds wonderfully. The author, although a little pedantic in the design and layout, does an excellent job of communicating each lesson. I recommend this book to any professional or hobbies programmer looking to get a little extra control over the build process.
Nice book; available on the net for free.......2007-06-03
I've just begun reading the book and it's a nice book on GNU's make. As already mentioned, it is not a handbook but rather more like a discussion of how to best use make in your builds. That said, I'd like to point out that the text is available on the net for free. If you look at the associated O'Reilly web-page for this book, you can find the link entitled "Online Book" - click on that to see the index of the free, online book.
Good Overview.......2007-03-15
This book is a good place to start for learning how to manage large projects with GNU Make. It covers the basics and then moves on to specialized topics including writing portable makefiles, increasing makefile performance, and debugging makefiles. I've been using GNU Make for years and still found the book worth reading.
Customer Reviews:
More specific to the RUP/UP than advertised........2007-07-26
The book appears to be a well written text about doing RUP iteratively. Unfortunately, I am not doing RUP or UP. The editorial review on Amazon quoted from the back cover that it would be appropriate for agile methodologies and not just RUP. While that may be the case for some chapters, for a significant portion of the book, I do not believe it is so. We are implementing Scrum and this book is not the best source to help me with that. It is too heavy and UP specific. I will be returning the book. Don't be turned off from the book if you are doing RUP since it may be for you.
Iterative Projects.......2007-01-09
Iterative Projects are a challenge to plan. They require additional attention to planning and re-planning that traditional projects 'do' but not in forced regular intervals - iterations. This is a solid reference overview of the processes, templates, roles, etc.
Some day... a reference will exist with more details on what was actually planned in iterations of a real project. Address the reality versus the concept.
Putting project structure on misunderstood agile methodologies..........2006-11-12
I can understand how iterative agile methodologies aren't always welcomed in a formal corporate IT structure. But using the guidelines in Managing Iterative Software Development Projects by Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence can add just enough formal structure to keep the benefits and comfort the traditionalists.
Contents:
Part 1 - The Principles of Iterative Project Management: What Is Iterative Development?; How Do Iterative Projects Function?; Controlling Iterative Projects; Are You Ready for Iterative Project Management?
Part 2 - Planning and Managing An Iterative Project: A Layered Approach to Planning and Managing Iterative Projects; Overall Project Planning; Evolution and Phase Planning; Iteration Planning; Iteration, Phase, and Project Assessments; A Scalable Approach to Managing Iterative Projects; Getting Started with Iterative Project Management
Part 3 - Appendices: A Brief Introduction to Use-Case Driven Development; Outlines, Templates, and Checklists; Examples
Index
The biggest mark against typical agile methodologies like Extreme Programming is that they appear to come across as a chaotic work effort designed to get things out fast with little documentation. That's an unrealistic oversimplification, but unfortunately that's the perception all too often. The result is that organizations stick with waterfall-style development activities, and things take far longer (and may not ever deliver the intended system) than they should. Bittner and Spence take the iterative style of development (short iterative releases, constant user feedback and re-evaluation) and put some of the more traditional project management checks in place. The iterations are mapped out ahead of time, and the project is managed as a whole, with "sub-projects" contained within. While not necessarily much different than the popular agile methodologies, it comes across as a more controlled formal process, without losing the flexibility of the iterative method of software development. If you're a small, informal team to start with, this might feel like overkill and a move back to "the Dark Side" of project management. But for those in formal IT shops that spend far too much time analyzing and not enough time actually building software, this could be the perfect approach to becoming agile.
Absolutely great.......2006-10-20
This book is the ultimate reference, the PMBOK on managing software development projects. Whereas other books are limited to one particular viewpoint or cookbook method, the authors in this book tap from many years of experience with different approaches. The only point of critique is that the book could probably also have been written on half as many pages. But this drawback is entirely compensated by the thoughts and best practices presented and the way they are presented, the experiences shared, the examples given and the method proposed here.
Wow!!! They did it again!!!.......2006-08-08
First it's important for me to say I already became a fan of the authors when I read their excellent book "Use Case Modeling". As I said in my review(still valid to this date): "If you can buy only one book about use cases, then buy this one !!!!". They created a masterpiece about RUP Requirements discipline.
Well... now, with the release of "Managing Iterative Software Development Projects", they did another SW Engineering best-of-breed book about Project Management(with RUP and also other agile approaches!).
With agile and iterative approaches becoming the mainstream in SW processes (just see how IBM, Borland, Microsoft, Compuware and other SW products companies jumped the agile bandwagon), this book is a must read for SW Project managers and leaders.
The book is divided in three parts:
- Part I: The Principles of Iterative Project Management -> this is for the project managers which still don't know the values and principles of iterative development and why they work better than waterfall approaches. As I already read a lot of books about iterative development( one of the most important books to understand the benefits of agile development is "Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman), I read this part very fast :-).
- Part II: The meat of the book -> Here we can break these in two sections: In chapters 6, 7, 8 the authors explain how to create a Layered Approach to Planning and Managing Iterative Projects. They explain, respectively, how to create: The overall project planning, the evolution and phase planning, the iteration planning. The second section(chapters 9, 10 and 11) deals with important considerations about assessments and retrospectives, how to scale for small or large projects, how to get started with Iterative Project Management.
Part III: Appendices -> Here we have an introduction to Use-Case Driven Development and some Outlines, Templates, and Checklists for the artifacts discussed in the book. But the best section is Appendix C, which contains a very nice example of an ATM project(based on their previous book, which also is good to give a sense of continuity) with: Overall Project Plan for Version 1.0 , Evolution 1 Plan, Evolution 1 Iteration Elaboration1 Plan and iteration E1 assessment.
Just to finally finish: If you need to manage iterative SW development projects, buy this book and also "Agile Estimating and Planning" (another excellent book about the subject) by Mike Cohn!
Kurt and Ian, if you see this, thank you for another excellent work!!! Maybe in the future we will see books about other disciplines. For the next my vote goes to: SW Architecture and Analysis and Design :-).
Product Description
Thank you for choosing Managing Enterprise Projects Using Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, an unprecedented learning guide and reference for project managers who use the Microsoft EPM platform. Our goal in writing this training/reference manual is to help you build on your knowledge of the stand-alone tool by mastering the enterprise project management environment. Follow our best practices to success and heed our warnings to avoid the pitfalls.
We take a systematic approach to the topical ordering in this book, beginning with a Project Server 2007 overview in Modules 01 and 02. Module 03 teaches you how to use two new features in Project Server 2007, Proposals and Activity Plans. In Modules 04-07, you learn to use Project Professional 2007 to define, plan, baseline, and publish an enterprise project. Modules 08-10, take you through the project updating process from team member progress reporting in Project Web Access and in Outlook, through your acceptance of the updates into the enterprise project plan. Module 11 wraps up with analyzing project variance. In Modules 12-15, you learn how to set up personal options, how to use the features in the Project Workspace, and how to create Status Reports. Modules 16-18 cover viewing enterprise project information and teach you how to use Data Analysis.
Throughout each module, you get a generous amount of Notes, Warnings, and Best Practices. Notes call your attention to important additional information about a subject. Warnings help you avoid the most common problems experienced by others and Best Practices provide tips for using the tool based on our field experience.
Customer Reviews:
The only book you will need on Project Server 2007.......2007-09-22
As the Director of a Project Management Office, this book is the definitive manual. It contains the latest and greatest problems, issues, and known bugs. It saves time and it is a great training tool. At 900 pages it takes a while to read, but the layout is great so you can find answers to specific problems quickly. I recommend this book to anyone that has anything to do with the administration of Project Server 2007.
Book Description
make is one of UNIX's greatest contributions to software development, and this book is the clearest description of make ever written. Even the smallest software project typically involves a number of files that depend upon each other in various ways. If you modify one or more source files, you must relink the program after recompiling some, but not necessarily all, of the sources. make greatly simplifies this process. By recording the relationships between sets of files, make can automatically perform all the necessary updating. For large projects with teams of programmers and multiple releases, make becomes even more critical. But in order to avoid spending a major portion of your maintenance budget on maintaining the Makefiles, you need a system for handling directories, dependencies, and macro definitions. This book describes all the basic features of make and provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects. Some of the issues addressed in the second edition include:
- Projects covering several directories.
- Maintaining consistency when building variants of a program.
- Automatic generation of header file dependencies.
- Forced rebuilds of existing files.
- A description of free products that contain major enhancements to make.
- Listings of the features that vary between different versions of make and simple ways to test them.
- More detail and examples on common errors, use of the shell in make, formal rules of syntax in make, and support for various utilities.
Customer Reviews:
You may even find this book helpful in Windows.......2002-01-31
Unfortunately there is nothing quite like this book (at least that I have ever found) for Windows nmake. In a former life I was a Unix programmer and I found this book invaluable, especially for creating custom suffix rules and recursive makefiles. Now that I am a Windows developer, I still refer to this book on occasion.
There is a lot of information packed in this book. Read it carefully, as it is easy to miss important information. I have marked up my copy with a highlighter pen and have a number of Post-It's stuck on those important sections. Perhaps a better layout, with wider margins and bulleted notes in the margins would have made it more readable and easier to find things after it has sat on the bookshelf for a while.
For the most part this book also applies to the Microsoft nmake utility (comes with Visual C++). I have yet to find anything equivalent for nmake, and the MSDN information on nmake is severely lacking. Apparently the folks at Microsoft believe everyone uses the built-in development environment in VC++, but for managing and building complex projects it is absolutely necessary to write and maintain your own makefiles.
Index very very shallow.......2001-05-23
Maybe this is a good book, but you wouldn't be able to tell that by the index. Something as basic as using conditionals with make(if .. then) should be indexed for easy referance. I've had to root through the book for various situations like this because the index was so sparse. I have had much more luck using the GNUmake online manuals which are free.
Good Book.......2001-03-25
I recently had to work on our project's make file. The first look at it made me nervous. Fortunately I found this book. This book is a great introduction to unix' power tool 'make'. The authors clearly had enough experience to tell us what,how and whys. The first chapter generates excitement to continue on to the next ones. Chapters two and three must be read with lots of patience. Remember, 'make' is a complex tool used for complex projects. Its not an easy go.Troubleshooting section listed some common problems, which, by the way, are really helpful. The project management is good too. The only complaint I have with this book is it is a little pricey.For thirty bucks, I expect more bang. The authors could have updated the book with new breed of make tools like Apache's 'ant'. An example of building a project could have really helped. The man pages listed for 'make' on my unix system didnt take me far enough to grasp this tool. I highly recommend it to beginners.
The book explain make clearly.......2001-02-01
Followed comments from previous reviewers, I look make infomation at gnu site, but I cannot understand make. After I take a look at this book, in half day I understand almost all the make tricks. This book explain make clearly. Highly recommended.
Make.......2000-09-07
Excellent book for learning the syntax of make, make's variable conventions, and environmental variable settings. The book gives a good base for understanding the makefile format and flow. Highly recommended for those who don't understand the Makefile approach and need an understanding of exsisting Makefiles.
Book Description
Practical, comprehensiveâa complete, no-nonsense guide to better project management...
This no-nonsense troubleshooting guide was written for frontline managers who want results, not rhetoric. Short on theory and long on practical, hands-on advice and guidance, it arms you with proven, easy-to-implement solutions to big ticket problems that plague today's software development projects, including those relating to personnel, quality, project scheduling and tracking, product requirements, product quality and usability, and much more. Written in a straightforward, conversational style and packed with realistic scenarios, Managing Software Development Projects, Second Edition shows you how to:
- Identify, resolve, and avoid most common development problems
- Improve the quality of your products and your customers' satisfaction with them
- Shorten development cycles
- Increase the productivity of your team members
Updated and expanded by over 50 percent to reflect many changes that have occurred in the field over the past four years, this Second Edition of the bestselling original is now, more than ever, an indispensable resource for every project manager or software developer.
Customer Reviews:
A good book for managers.......2006-05-24
I am continuously using this book to improve the productivity and quality in my company.
As a manager in the software area, this book is a must.
Every time I read the book, I find something new to change in the company.
A good practical Guide to the Art of PM.......2001-05-18
I have read many books on the subject of Project Management. Most fail , either because they try to treat PM as a science, or because they go completely the other way and lack any real substance. This book is different. It combines good sound PM methodology with common sense. This is complemented by practical examples of real life situations that I'm sure every PM can relate to. I would recommend every PM browse the chapter relevant to the phase of the project they are about to start on. It's amazing how much common sense we forget. This books demystifies PM and cuts out all the Jargon. It is a real asset to any PM who is serious about delivering software projects on time, within budget, to customer AND team satisfaction.
Project Managing.......1999-12-06
A good book about project managing, it's a knowledge that should be shared with all of IT managers and engineers.
Very well organized book.......1999-11-10
Very good book to read once and refer to it again and again. Practical scenarios make this book different from others. I have attended workshop by Neal Whitten. It was worth attending and surely he has enough number of issues with project management.
Perfect for first time software managers.......1999-11-03
It's simply a very easy to use book, it's structure is unique where it gives you what you need to know either by browsing the most common mistakes in software development process in every phase of the development cycle, or by reading the to-the-point lessons you should follow in each phase..I recommend it to new managers who need to be on the right track in a short time and also as a quick reference for every manager.
Book Description
A practical, hands-on guide to managing development teams and processes with the Visual Studio Team System development environment. Includes in-depth product information and insights from experienced trainers and early users. This is an ideal guide for using Visual Studio Team System to maximize project management effectiveness.
Customer Reviews:
Good on VSTS, lousy on process and requirements.......2007-09-30
This book provides a good overview of VSTS. It goes into enough detail that the reader understands the broad range capabilities without being overwhelmed. If you just want a reference on VSTS, then I recommend this book.
However, the book is just plain lousy when it comes to the process of managing an actual project. Firstly, PMBOK stands for "Body of Knowledge" not "Book of Knowledge". Secondly, the importance of gathering, analyzing, validating, and verify requirements is woefully under-represented. Quality is mentioned, but in such a cursory way as to be practically useless. Ditto on CMM - not enough detail is given on key processes and work products. The process here seems focused on building software without first determining what to build or checking the correctness of what was actually build.
The approach here might work on small greenfield projects, but would be a train-wreck on any large project with involving any degree of human safety, legacy systems, accountability, etc. In other words, the project management approach in this book is probably not suitable for 90% of projects in an enterprise IT environment.
Well organized and useful.......2007-09-26
This book helped me with ideas that put in practice, provided new ideas of as it manages projects with VSTS. For me it was useful.
Finally, a Practical Solution for teams to create quality software..........2007-08-28
In Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Joel really gets to the heart of addressing the reasons and benefits of having a common set of application lifecycle management tools (Visual Studio Team 2005 System) for all participants in the software development process to effectively track and report on individual and team progress.
It's not just the tracking and reporting, but its the metrics provided that allow answers to questions such as:" What percent complete are we at for this development project?; What's the overall software quality measurement?; How much more time is required before we are done?"
Not only does Joel discuss the problem of inter and extra-team communications for reporting on software development projects, he provides practical advice, examples and guidelines on how to implement and use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the communications and reporting processes for all roles (project manager, architect, developer, tester, sponsor, etc.) in the software development process.
A must read for anyone that manages Visual Studio.NET software development projects and wants to increase the effectiveness of their development efforts!
Customer Reviews:
Solid treatment of Agile Project Management Practices.......2007-09-02
This text covers agile project management practices: organic teams, guiding vision, simple rules, open information, light touch, and adaptive leadership. Each practice is covered as a separate chapter with ways to implement these practices. Specific leadership and management activities are detailed making this a valuable resource for agile practitioners.
Good book, weak opening sections.......2006-09-03
This is a solid book, but suffers from a very slow start. The first quarter of the book seems filled with too much mystical hand waving and too many buzzwords. The entire opening quarter of the book is stuffed with referenecs to "chordic edges" and "holographic formal structures." A few of the buzzwords get defined and used later on, but the overabundance of them was like fingers on a chalkboard. There are also a few irritants such as charts with poor explanations, or the assertion that test-driven development is an approach "specific to XP."
Things pick up greatly after chapter 3, however. The remainder of the book is solid, very useful, and full of great information for building and maintaining a solid development team. There's a lot of great focus on bringing value to the customer, and there are practical examples for all of the various aspects of running an agile project.
You'll find handy tables and explanations detailing estimation, task backlogs and job jars, and several great discussions on how to keep communication flowing with your customer. The sections on clearly establishing service criteria at the start of the project, and the clever use of sliders to help define success critieria, were nicely done.
Overall it's a very good book. The opening three or four chapters drag down what's otherwise a solid addition to my bookshelf. I'll get a good amount of use out of the book.
Practical yet thought-provoking.......2005-09-24
This is a very practical yet thought-provoking book. The book brings in a lot of thinking from complex adaptive systems to bear on the problem of managing agile projects. A lot of early agile thinking was that the role of the manager was to buy pizza and get out of the way. This book shows how the role of the agile project manager goes well beyond that and provides very specific activities to be performed by agile project managers.
The book covers topics (such as how to best organize an agile team or teams) that are glossed over elsewhere. Particularly useful may be the chapter on how to transition to an agile process. Among the specific principles and activities recommended in this book are certainly some that will immediately help your current project.
Excellent Resource for Managers - Agile and Non-Agile alike.......2005-08-20
Managing dynamic projects requires new ways of thinking about what it means to manage. This book provides a foundation for building an agile management approach that works for you and your team. As a consultant and trainer I am constantly looking for resources to improve my own practice and as tools to help my clients reach their full potential. This book is now on my short list of recommended readings.
Inconsistent, imprecise, and too much of a CCPace advertisement.......2005-08-15
I admired the goal of this book - to introduce the ideas of agile project management and to bridge the gap between the tomes describing methodologies and the concrete role that managers and leaders play on agile teams. A book that did that well would indeed be a worthy first gift to a new manager. Unfortunately, this isn't that book.
The inconsistent messages made it difficult to pull out concrete recommendations. For example, one of the key activities identified for a manager is to "monitor and adapt" to the team and corporate cultures. Later, though, he talks about entering situations sight-unseen with the goal to institute and enforce all of the rules of XP on a subject organization to the letter.
Lack of detail hurt the sections on catering a process to an organization. He goes into some detail on how to characterize the current culture and profile of the environment you're about to work in, but then just shows two extremes and potential "process cocktails" that might work for them. I would've loved to see, in addition, a list of the practices that you might try to roll out, and the specific elements of an organization's profile that make them more or less applicable so that a manager can come up with their own or at least know what negative experiences to expect.
Finally, the consulting company he works for comes across as some sort of omniscient savior. Either he's been extremely lucky or things are being sugar-coated. As he points out, agile projects are "chaordic" - right on the border between chaos and order. Real boats rock, and many of the best lessons in practical application come from the experiences of overcorrection or failing to act. I'd argue any significant project attempting to roll out agile methods will have some of those bumps along the way, and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I did enjoy the section on creating an conveying the project vision - he's quite correct that in a situation where you're relying a lot on the team to self-organize, communicating and reinforcing that vision and the team's goals are probably the top success factor for the project.
Customer Reviews:
THE Book on Requirements.......2006-04-03
Being in the software industry for about 10 years, I had known that our teams often did a poor job of managing, gathering, and understanding requirements. Our projects suffered because of this, and despite my gut instincts we were going the wrong direction, I often felt that I didn't have statistics and the insight to counter some of the more experienced staff or management. This book greatly has changed that as now I can come in armed with info and present better ways to improve our requirements management. I now feel that we'll deliver the right product or system instead of breaking the hearts of our customer and our own team members (because we won't be failing!). The authors also write in a very clear manner and provide excellent examples. I can't believe I am writing this about a requirements book, but I found myself actually _looking forward_ to reading each chapter. I am now confident I have the tools we need to sucessfully manage requirements. Thanks for a great book!
Well organized and written, based on their vast experience.......2004-02-02
I'm quite surprised to be the first reviewer of the second edition of this book since it ia a reference in requirements management.
After, but even during, reading this book you perceive that it's a sum up of their vast, deep and long experience. The authors are the implementors of RequisitePro the tool, now part of the Rational Suite, for requirements management, but this book is not a promo. Instead the whole process of gathering, organizing, and connecting (to following steps in the process) requirements is presented. It's clear to them that basically you have to collect the clouded needs of the stakeholders and formalize them in a set of documents that you have to give to the development team. And the entire process should effectively work, managing change.
After introductory chapters, you are presented with six skills a requisite team shoud have to effectively manage requrements and each skill is expressed, through different chapters, with what needs to be done and what needs to be produced.
I especially reccommend team skill 6 'Building the Right System' because in those chapters you find how to connect use cases to design (chapter 25), how to generate test cases from use cases (chapter 26), traceability techniques and tool from user needs to code (chapter 27). Besides this, team skill 4 'Managing scope'.
Don't forget to read chapter 30 that illustrates and compares extreme, agile, and roubust requirements gathering methodologies, and chapter 31 that sums up all the steps illustrated in the book, suggesting a methodology for requirements gathering based on the kind of project.
In the appendix you find chapters with the whole results of the case study (HOLIS), the detailed template of basic and fundamental documents for software requirements management, and, above all, two chapters one that is a brief presentation of RUP and another that is an indication on how to link the process so far developed to SEI-CMM and ISO 9000:2000.
Another useful feature is the fact that every concept is illustrated with a simple,visual example (in visual modeling philosophy) that allows you to impress the concept in mind. At the end you come out with all the concepts you found (even from different sources, but unrelated) with the big picture.
This is my first book on software requirements but it has many pros and only one con. It's a recent book that is aware of the state-of-the-art in managing software requirements (see bibliography), and I'm sure that other books in this field can't be overwhelmingly better. The only con, that is easily resolvable, is that the documents illustrated could have been included in a CD with the book.
Product Description
The only book devoted to Project Server for Project Managers, Managing Enterprise Projects using Microsoft Office Project Server 2003, Second Edition guides you through the layers of new functions and features you must know to manage projects effectively using Microsofts innovative enterprise project management software. This second edition covers updates to the software made through service packs one and two and includes new topics and a rich index. Award winning technologists Gary Chefetz and Dale Howard put years of field experience into your hands through a structured learning approach including hands-on exercises to reinforce each learning module. This book is perfect for users who already use a Microsoft Project version as a stand-alone tool, and want to acquire Microsoft EPM skills.
Customer Reviews:
Only Buy one Title from Author.......2006-03-15
I have purchased 3 books by Gary Chefetz. The first on Project Server 2002 was excellent, just the chapter on how to install and configure Project Server was worth the price of the book. This book "Managing Enterprise Project Using Microsoft Project Server 2003" is a very good hands-on tutorial style book. It does not give you a tremendous amount of background information around project management or on how to structure a project management office using Project Server as a tool, or why it is that you would do something one way as opposed to aother. But it is a very good intoductory and hands-on book. I have also purchased another of the author's books, and to be honest there is about an 80% overlap in content. Same text, same screen shots, with possibly two chapters being substantially different. So I would caution anyone to purchase more that one title from the author because of the high redundancy factor in the different publications. He has the word processing template down cold. It struck me that the author would make an excellent consultant, because the books tell you enough, without you yourself really being able to do it yourself, which then means you have to rely on their consulting services. After you have read these books, be aware that some assembly may still be required.
Good, but not Great..........2005-08-22
After having been spoiled by Mr. Chefetz's Project Server 2002 book, I was disappointed in this work. My primary complaint with this book is that it is much less complete than the earlier book. As another reviewer mentioned, this edition does not even have an index. In addition, the coverage of enterprise outline codes, enterprise fields, Project Web Access views, built-in functions and the differences between Project Center and Project views was all less than stellar. The other gripe I have is that what was deliverd in one book before (Chefetz's 2002 book), is now separated into two $50+ books. Is this a conspiracy by the publisher to sell more books?
That being said, the basics of MS Project Server were covered, and this book should serve well as an introductory treatment on the subject.
I'm still looking for a solid reference manual for the 2003 product.
James T. Heires, PMP
President
James Heires Consulting, Inc.
Home of EZ-Metrix code counting tool
(...)
They're not called MSProjectExperts for nothing..........2005-03-30
This book is packed with tips and recommendations you won't find in other books like Step by Step and SEU. It adds another layer of knowledge to make you reach a deeper understanding of the complex environment which is Project Professional in a Project Server system. And best of all, it's easy enough to read to be the first book you read on the subject.
Meat and Potatoes.......2005-02-02
I have Gary's PS2002 book and was fortunate to sit with him and observe him troubleshooting one day.
Just like the PS2002 version Gary and Dale have done a superb job for Project Server 2003. If you are a PS Admin and you do not have this book, you are probably doing it the hard way.
Both the 2002 and 2003 versions capture the "Meat and Potatoes"
of what Project Server is all about.
There is only one word to describe it, "Invaluable!"
Timothy D. Smith I - Collaborative Technology Architect/Admin
This book has NO index.......2004-12-01
I just got this book and one of the first things I noticed is that there is NO index? How can any technical book not have an index, especially since I plan to use this as a reference book.
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