What I’ve Learned From Failure?

Category: Computer
Author: Reginald Braithwaite
License: CC BY-ND 3.0
File type: HTML, PDF, ePub, Mobi (Kindle)

Read and download free eBook intituled What I’ve Learned From Failure? in format HTML, PDF, ePub, Mobi (Kindle) created by Reginald Braithwaite.

This book contains a lot of truth about software development. At least, a lot that feels true based on author’s experience. And that’s a point he makes clearly in one section: software development is probabilistic, not deterministic. If it were deterministic, the tradition “design it then build it, and you can have lots of mediocre minds working in parallel so long as really smart people do the design for them first” model would work. And it doesn’t. Time and time again it fails.

It also talks about the danger signs of failure, the kinds of things that if you don’t have them then your project is probably going to fail. For example, intimate knowledge of who is working on what: I can tell you, whenever the details of a project have slipped from my grasp, the project has started to drift into trouble. I make no apologies for now insisting on knowing exactly who, what, where, when, and why. There’s a big difference between being asked to explain your work in detail and being told how to do your job.