Book Review

First some background.
I have been involve in 2 projects so far at my current workplace, the first i wasn't involve to completion as i was transferred out to the next project where i managed to see it out all the way through to the deployment phase.

During the deployment, many problems occurred, things like system not performing as we thought it will be, missing segments that were not coded (and no body noticed it). During deployment we had no fixed building system for the new code that was written and we had to come out with our own scripts to build and deploy. And the deployment system wasn't too well thought out and throughly tested only adds to the pain.

And now the book...

Some of the advice in the books are probably known to seasoned developers,project leads, but what i think the value of the book probably lies in those who just came out of school. Unfortunately (at least during my time) in school, the modules in University were mostly related to the grammar and syntax of programming languages and how netmask works, there weren't much subjects related to actual programming problems/project problems that you might face when you are actually out there working on a real life project, like managing requirements, ensuring you have a good build, design patterns, source code control practices and so on.. (Think you guys can probably think of a few more).

Probably couldn't really blame the lecturers though.. In a school envrionment, it's probably quite sterile and the professors themselves are out of touch.

It brings you from what tools (CI tools, feature tracking, bug tracking) that you should have to project techniques (code reviews, the list). They propose a way of doing developement (Tracer Bullet developement) and ends with a section on common problems and how to fix them(Legacy code, testing untestable code, feature creep).

The book can be considered easy reading as compared to a regular boring computer realated book and the author not only shows the problem but also the solution and how to monitor it. It has something for developers, leads and managers