Aside from Brooks’s Law, Fred Brooks is also famous for another so-called “law” in software engineering: the No Silver Bullet argument.
There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
Agile: In A Flash is a great source of software engineering tips regardless if you’re planning to go agile or not.
Out of the many flash cards in that site, I find the two cards above to be the most important to a novice software developer. It should make them feel less surprised when Brook’s Law or Hofstadter’s Law hits them from out of nowhere.
The most annoying part about passing by the Computer section of bookstores is when you realize that all of the books in the bookshelves will be obsolete in 5-10 years. This is why serious software engineers prioritize books on processes and methodologies over books on tools.
One guy (Jurgen Appelo) compiled a list of the best of SE books based on “1) number of Amazon reviews, 2) average Amazon rating, 3) number of Google hits and 4) Jolt awards”. Think SE version of Personal MBA.
Below the cut is the top ten. I’ve included my own mini-reviews for the books that I’ve already read.
While I was fixing my Google Reader feed for BusinessWorld‘s IT Matters site (they changed from http://www.itmatters.com.ph/RSS/itmatters.rss to http://www.bworldonline.com/RSS/itmatters.rss), one article caught my eye:
My first reaction was, “No sh*t, Sherlock!” After reading the article and finding out that it’s not talking about software engineering practices (which I am sure isn’t being practiced by many local software houses) but the low adoption rates of best practices in Auditing and Risk Management in IT departments, my reaction was still “No sh*t, Sherlock!”. I mean, if you’re dealing with foreign clients and yet you’re not familiar with those processes then you have a big problem on your hands. Either that or you know a good place with steak and strippers.
Since we’re at the topic of Best Practices, I might as well cover it in this post.
