Customer Reviews
I loved this book - but be careful - By: Al, 27 Dec 2008 
A great book - highly readable. Definitely worth buying if you'rein any sort of management or if you want to know what to look out for from a great (or terrible!) company.
Be careful though. You may want a new job by the time you've finished it. At one point it lists the things a company should be doing - my place does non of them!
When I discussed with my boss he thought it was rather idealistic...but then again he would :-)
Peopleoriented view of project management and software development - By: Rolf Häsänen, 28 Oct 2008 Since this book focuses on people it does not matter that it is ancientin Internet time. It was short of revolutionary when it was published & it still remains as an extremly good & eyeopening book as to how get people to work wellin teams. The book brings out good ideas with very real cases, it does not give you a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms which is not necessarly a shortcoming since the book is meant to present it's ideas from a pragmatic viewpoint.
I would recommend this book for anyone working within software development & it should be a must for team leaders & project managers together with the books Death March & Mythical Man Month.
Classic text for software manager - By: Dr. Andrew Brown, 09 Jan 2008 This is a must read for anyone wishing to understand why software development is not always as successful as it should be. The list of references is also a useful source of further reading.
You should, however, be prepared to be rather depressed when you realise how little of the book's advice you are currently following & how unlikely it is that your employer will agree to implement anything from the book.
A classic that is worth of more than this one costs - By: Kerola Sami, 04 Apr 2007 This book truly should belong to every computer professionals shelf. After all all problems are at the end people problems & people doing computer stuff has at least reputation of not being good with people.
If you are team leader or boss of any kind buying this book really can help you see what could done to make your team or organization better place to work. If you are just ordinary worker after reading this one you might understand why it sucks to go work at morning.
I wish that all managers would read this book - By: Ethann Castell, 03 Sep 2005 Fantastic book about the people side of software development. The ideasin this book, & the typical corporate environment, are worlds apart.
My experience has been that managers either don't know this stuff, or if they do know it, then they feel that they would just have to go out on too much of a limb to implement these ideas. This is a shame because most for the conceptsin this book are the very things that enable software developers to thrive.
One of the main ideas that resonated with me was the idea of giving developers enough private space. I have never been a fan of open plan office space. I think that it works well for some professions, but not all, & certainly not for software developers. Legend has it that Microsoft lets each developer have their own office which they can furnish as they please. One programmer is supposed to have broughtin bucket-loads of sand to make his office into a beach !
If you are a Manager then read this book & implement as much as you can. Otherwise buy a copy & leave it on your Managers desk.
