We now turn to those parts of our discipline that require that we go beyond just good general management.
In Chapter 5, "The Most Important Thing," I discuss the most important differentiator in software development project success: the iterative development concept. It turns out that the single biggest factor in the timely delivery of a quality software product is this: Has the team effectively practiced iterative development?
Chapter 6, "Modeling," talks about one of the few new tools that have helped raise the level of abstraction and better communicate what software is all about. The downside of this trend has been a tendency to undervalue coding, which is what programmers spend most of their time doing.
So, in Chapter 7, "Coding," I talk very briefly about programming languages and how developers and managers can adapt to the "language du jour" that seems to appear with great regularity every 10 years or so.
Finally, I note in Chapter 8, "Getting It Out the Door," that one must first ship a product to have it be successfulthose products you work on forever are rarely profitable. But it turns out that getting the product out the door is not as simple as it first appears. I provide some help for those who have not yet mastered this "annoying" yet essential part of our discipline.
