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rbogue's review
5.0
More than 10 years ago Jim McCarthy wrote the first edition of Dynamics of Software Development. At that time it was a great book. It helped identify specific behavior patterns that software development teams fall into. Perhaps the most familiar behavior pattern is flipping the “Bozo bit” – in other words writing someone off as not a valuable member on the team. Small nuggets of insight like this one are woven together into a tapestry of the behaviors you don’t want to see in your team.
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marksutherland's review
4.0
An entertaining ramble through the concerns that should plague anyone who works on a software development team, and particularly their managers, through the course of a project.
The book is structured as a series of 'rules', broken into sections that represent the phase of the project. The rule titles are often quite abstract (e.g. "Don't shake the Jell-O") and while they make sense with the accompanying text, they might not stand well by themselves. This gets to major issue with the book, the authors style is very descriptive and entertaining, but as often as this helps illustrate his point, it clouds and confuses his message. It can lead to some excellent quotes (I've added some of the best to this review) but it often feels like his editor should have made him take out half of the adjectives and pick which phrase best lays things out instead of all three.
As this book is now 25(!) years old, some of his advice is simply best practice these days, but there aren't many modern books that do as good a job of covering the arc of a project and various issues that afflict development teams. Some of these psycho-social insights are still valuable, but occasionally he veers into evolutionary anthropology or other questionable rationalizations and it all gets a bit Hacker News. For example, there's a particularly grating section where he discusses a woman who clearly wanted to move into management and instead of supporting that they get her to define an entirely new job that, frankly, sounds like management.
Ultimately, this is as worthy a read as [b:The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering|13629|The Mythical Man-Month Essays on Software Engineering|Frederick P. Brooks Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348430512l/13629._SX50_.jpg|1905885] for the useful advice and the historical context it provides, even if time has exposed some of its weaknesses.
And now those quotes:
The book is structured as a series of 'rules', broken into sections that represent the phase of the project. The rule titles are often quite abstract (e.g. "Don't shake the Jell-O") and while they make sense with the accompanying text, they might not stand well by themselves. This gets to major issue with the book, the authors style is very descriptive and entertaining, but as often as this helps illustrate his point, it clouds and confuses his message. It can lead to some excellent quotes (I've added some of the best to this review) but it often feels like his editor should have made him take out half of the adjectives and pick which phrase best lays things out instead of all three.
As this book is now 25(!) years old, some of his advice is simply best practice these days, but there aren't many modern books that do as good a job of covering the arc of a project and various issues that afflict development teams. Some of these psycho-social insights are still valuable, but occasionally he veers into evolutionary anthropology or other questionable rationalizations and it all gets a bit Hacker News. For example, there's a particularly grating section where he discusses a woman who clearly wanted to move into management and instead of supporting that they get her to define an entirely new job that, frankly, sounds like management.
Ultimately, this is as worthy a read as [b:The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering|13629|The Mythical Man-Month Essays on Software Engineering|Frederick P. Brooks Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348430512l/13629._SX50_.jpg|1905885] for the useful advice and the historical context it provides, even if time has exposed some of its weaknesses.
And now those quotes:
The unrelenting natural tendency in software development is to transmute hopes and wishes into peculiar reality distortion fields.
Software expresses the team that created it.
Self expression is irrepressible in the act of creating software.
Put time into your design ... Time is one ofhte primary media with which you are working ... A product which is not designed to ship on time, won't.
Everyone on the team is engaged in the process of software development: everyone is a developer
The end of software development is software developers
If yo uask a developer the status of something they are working on, they might be correct, but if so it's a coincidence
Slipping is like waking up from that software dream, getting closer to reality
Development develops developers
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