Foreword
Why should anyone listen to what Joe Marasco has to say about software development and the people who do it? In the spring of 1991, we awarded Joe his five-year service award. Back then, Rational Software was small enough to individualize these awards, and Joe's was quite unusual. We obtained the hood ornament from a Mack truckthe classic bulldogand mounted it on a plaque. Everyone agreed that this award symbolized Joe's dedication and tenacity when it came to getting the job done. So it wasn't too surprising when, later that year, we selected Joe to lead a watershed development effort at Rational. At the time, our flagship product, the Rational Environment, ran on proprietary hardware, and we realized the importance of moving it to the UNIX platform. While this move was inevitable, it was fraught with risk; in fact, many other companies suffered fatal damage trying to move their software solution from proprietary hardware to industry standard platformsamong the carcasses littering the side of the road were electronic design automation (EDA) companies such as Daisy and language-specific companies such as Symbolics. The task was known to be difficult, the result uncertain, and the need essential. Joe, on the other hand, was positively ancient by Silicon Valley standards: he was 46. But we believed that Joe's experience and "steady hand at the tiller" would see this project through. We also knew that Joe would do whatever it took to get the project done. The record speaks for itself. In September 1991, Joe took on the leadership of the new team with a plan to deliver "Rational II" in two years on two UNIX platforms. After seven months, a limited-function subset prototype was up and running. After 16 months, the development team was "self-hosted," which meant that it was able to complete the development of the product using the partially-completed product itself. And, to the minute, the team delivered what became known as Rational Apex on two UNIX platformsIBM and Sunin the two years that had been promised. Apex was an extremely successful product, one that is still delivering value to customers today. Joe was the Business Unit Manager through releases 2.0 and 3.0 and also oversaw its porting to every significant UNIX platform and to the Windows platform as well. More important, for the 10 years following the release of Apex 1.0 in 1993, Joe was the "go-to" guy whenever we had a difficult product delivery problem in the company. As the company grew through merger and acquisition, Joe assumed the role of troubleshooter, helping out wherever the need was greatest, wherever the pressure was most intense. One of the reasons Joe was so successful in delivering products is that he spent a lot of time with his developers understanding the details of the products and the development problems. But he also spent a lot of time with Rational's customers, developing a keen understanding of their needs. As every product delivery is the result of many compromises, Joe was always well informed to make good judgments when it came to product decisions. Near the end of his career at Rational, Joe began to write about software development in a series of articles in Rational's e-zine, The Rational Edge. Unlike the articles written by our "Three Amigos," these were much more down in the trenches, reflecting his experiences both at Rational and in his previous environments. What we discovered was that Joe was able to cogently articulate his experience and act as a "virtual mentor" for budding software development managers worldwide. The response to these articles was extremely positive, and it is a pleasure to see them all collected here in one place. This is not a theoretical treatise on software development. That's not what Joe was all about. Joe was about having his teams ship products we could all be proud of, products that were easy to maintain and offered real value to customers. If you want to develop products that you can be proud of, that lend value to your customers, this book is a "must-read."
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EAN: N/A
Pages: 269