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A review by ericwelch
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg
4.0
As CIO at a small college, I had the distinct unpleasure of signing purchase orders for software license renewals and maintenance contracts. In what other business would you buy a product that costs enormous sums of money, is guaranteed to be flawed, will require frequent and costly upgrades, never lives up to its promises, and requires a team of lawyers to interpret the contract, not to mention days of very expensive training for your staff. Welcome to the world of software.
Rosenberg follows the progress of the development of a software package from idea through development and debugging to end (actually, there is no end and to my knowledge they are still trying to come up with a workable product that may have already been superseded by others.). A major difficulty of development is getting many hundreds of programmers to work together and integrate their work into a cohesive product. Not to mention major resdeisgns in the middle of the project - try that with a bridge. The section on learning how to manage the project is worth the cost of the book. Programmers are well known for spending as much time designing the tools to help them use the tools and to save them time using the tools to work on the project than on the code itself.
"But in much of the business world today there lies, beneath the wide dissatisfaction with how software projects perform, a deeper anxiety—a fear that the root of the problem may lie not in failures of management technique but in the very nature of the people doing the work. To many executives, and even to their coworkers in sales or other parts of a company, programmers often seem to belong to an entirely different species. Communicating with them is frustratingly hard. They fail to respond to applications of the usual reward/punishment stimuli. They are geeks, and they are a problem."
I'm not a programmer, yet I found this book fascinating reading and learning about the dynamics of creating some of these monstrous programs. Vista, anyone?
Similar recommended titles: [b:The Soul of a New Machine|7090|The Soul of a New Machine|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606419s/7090.jpg|882196] by Tracy Kidder.
OK, I admit it. I'm adding a quote that is very interesting but it also represents my playing around with my clippings file on the Kindle to see how easy it is to save and export quotes, etc. Really easy, as it turns out. This one relates to the difficulty of managing programmers (kind of like herding cats) and much of the reason stems from the attributes (almost an autistic or Asperger's personality -- in fact, there has been an explosion of diagnosed autism in Silicon Valley) of programmers.
"Forty-one percent of the IT professionals surveyed reported being introverted thinkers (combination of introversion and thinking preferences), nearly twice the percentage in the general population. Introverted thinkers often prefer a lone-gun approach to work, often avoiding teams, collaborative efforts, and the training that support such structures. This group is least likely to engage and connect interpersonally with others, and may avoid creating personal bridges of trust and openness with colleagues. . . A lot of people feel that communicating with the information technology professional is just slightly harder than communicating with the dead,” Abby Mackness, an analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton who conducted the Human Dynamics study, joked as she presented its results to a crowd of defense contractor employees and consultants."
Rosenberg follows the progress of the development of a software package from idea through development and debugging to end (actually, there is no end and to my knowledge they are still trying to come up with a workable product that may have already been superseded by others.). A major difficulty of development is getting many hundreds of programmers to work together and integrate their work into a cohesive product. Not to mention major resdeisgns in the middle of the project - try that with a bridge. The section on learning how to manage the project is worth the cost of the book. Programmers are well known for spending as much time designing the tools to help them use the tools and to save them time using the tools to work on the project than on the code itself.
"But in much of the business world today there lies, beneath the wide dissatisfaction with how software projects perform, a deeper anxiety—a fear that the root of the problem may lie not in failures of management technique but in the very nature of the people doing the work. To many executives, and even to their coworkers in sales or other parts of a company, programmers often seem to belong to an entirely different species. Communicating with them is frustratingly hard. They fail to respond to applications of the usual reward/punishment stimuli. They are geeks, and they are a problem."
I'm not a programmer, yet I found this book fascinating reading and learning about the dynamics of creating some of these monstrous programs. Vista, anyone?
Similar recommended titles: [b:The Soul of a New Machine|7090|The Soul of a New Machine|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606419s/7090.jpg|882196] by Tracy Kidder.
OK, I admit it. I'm adding a quote that is very interesting but it also represents my playing around with my clippings file on the Kindle to see how easy it is to save and export quotes, etc. Really easy, as it turns out. This one relates to the difficulty of managing programmers (kind of like herding cats) and much of the reason stems from the attributes (almost an autistic or Asperger's personality -- in fact, there has been an explosion of diagnosed autism in Silicon Valley) of programmers.
"Forty-one percent of the IT professionals surveyed reported being introverted thinkers (combination of introversion and thinking preferences), nearly twice the percentage in the general population. Introverted thinkers often prefer a lone-gun approach to work, often avoiding teams, collaborative efforts, and the training that support such structures. This group is least likely to engage and connect interpersonally with others, and may avoid creating personal bridges of trust and openness with colleagues. . . A lot of people feel that communicating with the information technology professional is just slightly harder than communicating with the dead,” Abby Mackness, an analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton who conducted the Human Dynamics study, joked as she presented its results to a crowd of defense contractor employees and consultants."