| > Can I be the "lazy person" and ask which are the author's points?! Yes, you can, and I can be the hurried person with no time to summarise, and recommend you read the book yourself. It's not like those business books that have a single thesis, backed by 100 examples to support it, where the thesis itself can be written on the back of a stamp. I can however try and describe to you what the book is about. It's a book about how legacy software interventions are about the people as much as about the code and the machines, with advice for aligning incentives between stakeholders, developers and managers, It's about prioritising competing goals under different sets of constraints, with useful advice for ensuring psychological safety in your team. It's about measuring risk, and acting on the measurements. It's about anthropology of software-using organisations, and about organisational design, and how those disciplines inform the job of recovering wayward software projects. It's not a book about computers, or about programming, or even about software management. It's about people in organisations doing all of the above. It's about defining the right job to do lest you attempt to do the wrong job right. It reads like an instant classic, like a "missing manual" for running software development operations in big organisations... but with advice that's also applicable at smaller scales. I just finished reading it and I started on Chapter 1 again. It's that good. |