New Book Review: "Controlling Software Projects"
New book review for Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement & Estimation, by Tom DeMarco, Yourdon Press, 1982:
This text was initially noted by this reviewer while reading a white paper written by Johanna Rothman that a colleague recently passed on to me entitled "Are We There Yet?: Creating Project Dashboards to Display Progress", and after a good experience reading "Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (see my review) this reviewer was ready to re-experience the superb writing style and diagram notation of the author. But then the publish date was discovered. Is it possible that a 30-year-old project management text can be appreciated in an age of agile development? In the opinion of this reviewer, large portions of this book are still viable, but the reader needs to maneuver through some of the information that is outdated, and in many cases downright risky to follow. Because of this intermingling, this reviewer can only recommend this text to readers with a substantive amount of software development experience.
While following a reading of this book this reviewer still recommends "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" by Steve McConnell (see my review) as the best overall project estimation text, what is appealing to this Six Sigma practitioner are the metrics presented throughout this text even though McConnell indicates that many of the early metrics that are still being referenced within the industry were harvested from large government projects. Metrics can be compelling, but it helps to understand that there are many different types of software development projects taking place in many different corporate cultures, and "Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed" by Barry Boehm and Richard Turner (see my review) interestingly enough co-written by the individual who wrote the forward for the object of this review 20 years prior can greatly aid leadership in this industry as they choose which direction to take in this regard.