Table of Contents

The Software Development Edge: Essays on Managing Successful Projects
By Joe Marasco
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Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional
Pub Date: April 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-32-132131-6
Pages: 336

Table of Contents  | Index

		Copyright
		Praise for The Software Development Edge
		About the Author
		Foreword
		Preface
		Part 1.  GENERAL MANAGEMENT
			Chapter 1.  Beginning at the Beginning
				The Importance of Good Software
				Hard Rocks in the Swamp
				Audience
				The Iterative Problem-Solving Clock
				Recap
			Chapter 2.  Computational Roots
				The Precipitator
				The Answer
				How This Program Worked
				Why Was This Generation of Engineers Special?
				Computation
				Getting to Know the Numbers by Their First Names
				So How About Those Computers?
				Our Computational Heritage
				Recap
			Chapter 3.  Mountaineering
				On Climbing Big Mountains
				Common Causes of Failure
				Ingredients for Success
				The Human Factor
				Recap
			Chapter 4.  Managing
				Managing Teams
				Recap
		Part 2.  SOFTWARE DIFFERENCES
			Chapter 5.  The Most Important Thing
				Iterative Development
				Roscoe Leroy
				Going Over the Waterfall
				The Other Extreme
				Roscoe's First Picture
				Roscoe's Second Picture
				Wait a Minute!
				Keeping the Vectors Short
				The Application to Software Development
				Applied Learning and Short-Vector Direction
				Risk Targeting
				Have You Heard This One Before?
				More on Applied Learning
				Business Implications
				The Staffing Effect
				Just Plain Horse (shoe) Sense
				Recap
			Chapter 6.  Modeling
				How to Explain the UML
				What Is the UML, and Why Is It Important?
				A Second, Less Trivial Example
				The Third Example
				And Now for the Relevance to Software…
				Raising the Level of Abstraction
				Recap
			Chapter 7.  Coding
				How Managers Can Learn a New Programming Language
				The Problem, Better Defined
				What Should the Standard Problem Contain?
				The Animal Game
				Does the Animal Game Fit the Criteria?
				Does It Pass the "So What?" Test?
				It's Your Game
				Recap
			Chapter 8.  Getting It Out the Door
				If You Build It, They Will Come
				In the Beginning, There Was the Sandbox
				Why Should the Product Build Be Hard, Anyway?
				What About Iterative Development?
				Recap
		Part 3.  THE PROJECT-MANAGEMENT VIEW
			Chapter 9.  Trade-Offs
				The Project Pyramid
				Five, Not Four
				Enter the Pyramid
				The Altitude Variable
				The Pyramid's Volume Is Constant
				A Statistical Interlude
				Right Idea, Wrong Distribution
				Implications for Real Projects
				What Does It Take to Get to a Coin Flip?
				More Confidence
				Important Caveats
				It's All About Risk
				Recap
			Chapter 10.  Estimating
				What If We Used Common Sense?
				Chocolate Versus Vanilla
				Roscoe Explains
				Roscoe Goes Deeper
				Roscoe's Calendar
				Roscoe Computes
				Roscoe Gets into Software
				Roscoe Reports In
				Guess We Did Something Right
				Roscoe Sums It Up
				Roscoe Picks a Bone
				Guess We Did Something Right, Part Two
				Roscoe Admitted to Software Project Manager Fraternity
				Recap
			Chapter 11.  Scheduling
				Roscoe Poses the Problem: How Late Are You Gonna Be?
				Joe Makes a Slight Comeback
				Roscoe Returns
				Roscoe's Rogue's Gallery
				Roscoe's Graph
				One Last Objection
				Roscoe's Parting Shot
				Recap
			Chapter 12.  Rhythm
				A Physicist Looks at Project Progress
				Reality Intrudes
				What About Iterative Development?
				One Last Graph
				Recap
		Part 4.  THE HUMAN ELEMENT
			Chapter 13.  Politics
				Context
				Definition
				Three Scenarios
				Politics Is Inevitable, But…
				When Things Get Political
				The Engineering Mapping
				High-Trust Environments
				Other Variants of Bad Politics
				Recap
			Chapter 14.  Negotiating
				Communication Is Everything
				Roscoe Explains His Theory
				Are We Done Yet?
				Recap
			Chapter 15.  Signing Up
				Roscoe Gets His Nose Bloodied…
				…And Immediately Cuts to the Chase
				Vesuvius Erupts
				How They Do It in Texas
				The Relevance to Software
				The Dog Ate My Homework
				Spec Wars?
				The Three Most Common Excuses
				And Another Thing…
				Thrust, Parry, and Riposte
				Large Project Chicken
				The End of Software Development as We Know It?
				Elaboration Versus Construction
				Tough Love
				Recap
			Chapter 16.  Compensation
				Going for the Flow
				Flow and Software Development Performance
				Applying the Flow Model to Compensation
				Money Isn't Always the Answer
				Recap
		Part 5.  THINKING LATERALLY
			Chapter 17.  History Lesson
				Don't Let the King Be Your Architect
				Things Aren't Always as They Seem
				Checking the Design
				Knowing What You Don't Know
				Continuity of Leadership
				In a Hurry, As Usual
				Focusing on the Wrong Features
				When the Design Is Bad…
				The Relevance of Testing
				Prototype Versus Product
				The Inquest
				Recap
			Chapter 18.  Bad Analogies
				Houston, We Have a Problem
				Fig Newtons
				Everything's Relative
				Quantum Nonsense
				Heat Death
				Other Examples
				Good Science
				Recap
			Chapter 19.  The Refresh Problem
				Refreshing Embedded Software
				The Current Situation
				The Software Upgrade Game
				A Modest Proposal
				Software Upgrades, Revisited
				Some Nice Things Come for Free
				Why This Will Work
				Refinement
				What About Software Piracy?
				Until the Sun Takes Over
				Recap
			Chapter 20.  Not So Random Numbers
				Roscoe Sets the Stage
				Simulating the Batter
				First Steps
				Second Steps
				Generating More Probabilities
				Of Course, We've Already Left the World of Baseball
				Reality Is Ugly
				Monday's Solution
				Lessons Learned
				Recap
		Part 6.  ADVANCED TOPICS
			Chapter 21.  Crisis
				The Five Days of the Fish
				The Fish Market
				Day 1: Unaware
				Day 2: Avoiding the Issue
				Day 3: Enter "The Fixer"
				Day 4: The Turning Point
				Day 5: Two Critical Paths
				Moral of the Story
				Recap
			Chapter 22.  Growth
				Growth Issues
				The Naïve Model
				Consequences of the Model
				An Illustrative Example
				Non-Linearity
				Call to Action
				Conclusions
				Nomograph
				Spreadsheet
				Recap
			Chapter 23.  Culture
				What Is a Culture?
				Strong and Weak Cultures
				Defining Corporate Values
				And the Applicability to Software Is…
				Building a Strong Culture
				When You're Looking for a Job…
				The Bottom Line
				Recap
			Chapter 24.  Putting It All Together
				Schlepper
				Macher
				Mensch
				More on Mensches
				Population Distribution
				Some Final Thoughts on the Model
				Recap
			Acknowledgments
		Index