Get Stuck or Get Results. Period.

The goal of this book is to get you unstuck from spinning your development cycles or to help you avoid getting stuck in the first place by providing processes and tips to help you become more productive.

What do I mean by "getting stuck"?

• Your developers are spending less time writing new code and are in maintenance mode most of the time. The 80/20 rule usually comes up here. For example, developers should be spending 80 percent of their time writing new code and 20 percent fixing bugs, not vice versa.

• The morale of your team suffers. Developers and testers get increasingly frustrated with the lack of consistency and reliability of builds and being in reactive mode all the time. A lot of unnecessary finger-pointing is a bad indicator.

• You miss ship or release dates, and your customer satisfaction suffers.

• Your ability to reproduce builds and deliver hotfixes becomes increasingly difficult. You spend more time trying to reproduce a build or build a hotfix than you do fixing the code that caused the bug.

• You do not have a reliable process of tracking and building all the code changes in your product, and the stability of the product is unpredictable at best.

At the end of the day, all these issues, which you could avoid, will end up costing your company lots of money because you will be patching or hacking whatever process you currently have that does not seem to be getting the job done.