|
Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. (平装)
by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister
| Category:
IT, Software, Technology |
| Market price: ¥ 378.00
MSL price:
¥ 338.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
The book made a clear and compelling augument that the human factor, not technology, makes or breaks a software development effort. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 15 items |
|
|
D. Williams (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This book is as essential as everyone here makes it out to be. However, the authors' development of the notion of teamicide needs to be seriously questioned. While there is some truth to their characteriza- tion of incentive-based systems or tracking through testing having the ability to go haywire, the stated anti-postulate reads like an articulation of the doctrine of the soviet. No individuals' performances can be acknowledged to the group? At all times it must be enforced that the only goal is the group goal? This is the only dark ray in an otherwise wonderful collection of great insights. The reality is that a balance must be struck. I know balance and shades of gray are not popular in our polarizing, cartoon times, but politically, both the extreme Horatio Alger and the notion of the great state have crashed and burned. Truly, what is needed are more plural forms of organization. |
|
|
An American reader, USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
The main goal of this book is that it encourages the software developers and their management to think deeply about they way they create the software. Software development is the "research", not the "production", and the stimulus and processes that work well in for example metallurgy will harm software development. The authors show the consequences of borrowing organizational processes from other areas to software. They encourage to focus on the people rather than to process. The software developers aren't "replaceable units", "plastic uniformed people".
Although the textual work of the authors is marvelous, the quality of the printed book (paperback edition) is awful. The paper is thin and translucent, showing the lines from the other pages, the interline spacing is too low, turning a page to a big mess. That was the only reason I've rated the book as four-stars.
The information in this book is very accurate, without pure assertions. The authors always are giving full references if they are providing figures or studies. The authors have a good sense of humor, and it is the great pleasure to read this book. The information is given in the very dense manner: the other authors might have needed ten volumes to express what Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister has put in this small book.
I strongly recommend this book to any individual involved in software development, as well as Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn. These books aren't from "ten steps to success" series. They encourage deep, creative approach to the topic.
|
|
|
Tim (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
In his 25th Anniversary Edition of Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks points to Peopleware as the influential IS book of the 1980's, and says that it was influential for the same reason MMM was: The primary challenges of software development are social, not technical. Companies that forget this are setting themselves up for failure.
If you've seen dilbert style software "management" and want to find a better way, I can't recommend this book more strongly. If you read it, you'll want to find a way to get your superiors to read it as well.
In my experience, a great deal of so-called "management" is really shoft-term optimization: "IF we can eliminate X benefit we can save $Y per year!" and cost control. DeMarco and Lister point out that the real goal is productivity, and suggest numerous ways to treat employees as people to get increased productivity, as opposed to treating them as inhuman "Resources" and managing by spreadsheet.
One story from the book: In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to work on a project managed by Sharon Weinberg, now president of the Codd and Date Consulting Group. She was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged msyelf out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me propped up at a console. She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After she'd poured it into me and buoued up my spirits, I asked her how she found time to for such things with all the management work she had to do. She game me her patented grin and said "Tim, this IS management!"
This book is all about the manager's role: Not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. How to do that, how teams jell, etc. It's a pleasure to read and it's… right. And in a field full of false promises, snake oil, and worthless statistics, that's saying something. |
|
|
David Walker (MSL quote), Australia
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Summed up in one sentence, Peopleware says this: give smart people physical space, intellectual responsibility and strategic direction. DeMarco and Lister advocate private offices and windows. They advocate creating teams with aligned goals and limited non-team work. They advocate managers finding good staff and putting their fate in the hands of those staff. The manager's function, they write, is not to make people work but to make it possible for people to work.
Why is Peopleware so important to Microsoft and a handful of other successful companies? Why does it inspire such intense devotion amongst the elite group of people who think about software project management for a living? Its direct writing and its amusing anecdotes win it friends. So does its fundamental belief that people will behave decently given the right conditions. Then again, lots of books read easily, contain funny stories and exude goodwill. Peopleware's persuasiveness comes from its numbers - from its simple, cold, numerical demonstration that improving programmers' environments will make them more productive.
The numbers in Peopleware come from DeMarco and Lister's Coding War Games, a series of competitions to complete given coding and testing tasks in minimal time and with minimal defects. The Games have consistently confirmed various known facts of the software game. For instance, the best coders outperform the ten-to-one, but their pay seems only weakly linked to their performance. But DeMarco and Lister also found that the best-performing coders had larger, quieter, more private workspaces. It is for this one empirical finding that Peopleware is best known.
(As an aside, it's worth knowing that DeMarco and Lister tried to track down the research showing that open-plan offices make people more productive. It didn't exist. Cubicle makers just kept saying it, without evidence - a technique Peopleware describes as "proof by repeated assertion".)
Around their Coding Wars data, DeMarco and Lister assembled a theory: that managers should help programmers, designers, writers and other brainworkers to reach a state that psychologists call "flow" - an almost meditative condition where people can achieve important leaps towards solving complex problems. It's the state where you start work, look up, and notice that three hours have passed. But it takes time - perhaps fifteen minutes on average - to get into this state. And DeMarco and Lister that today's typical noisy, cubicled, Dilbertesque office rarely allows people 15 minutes of uninterrupted work. In other words, the world is full of places where a highly-paid and dedicated programmer or creative artist can spend a full day without ever getting any hard-core work. Put another way, the world is full of cheap opportunities for people to make their co-workers more productive, just by building their offices a bit smarter.
A decade and a half after Peopleware was written, and after the arrival of a new young breed of IT companies called Web development firms, it would be nice to think DeMarco and Lister's ideas have been widely adopted. Instead, they remain widely ignored. In an economy where smart employees can increasingly pick and choose, it will be interesting to see how much longer this ignorance can continue. |
|
|
Vijay G (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This book mainly talks about people, office environment, work environment, team etc. Eventhough, it is definite must read book for managers who manage software or software type of works (Application Specific Hardware, ASIC, VLSI, etc), it is highly recommended book for anyone from junior engineer to CEO.
Read this book to know,
- why somewhere today some projects are failing?
- why managers like to manage technology than people?
- how far do we need to push the quality of a product?
- how much space and facility should we need?
- what are the side effects of working overtime?
- what are the fundamental response to change?
and many more.
Excellent advise, best insight into the organizations, classic work area facts in simple plain English.
|
|
|
Dianne Seaman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Reading the table of contents for Peopleware tells you a lot about the content and the tone. Here are a few of the chapter headings:
Quality - If Time Permits
"You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5"
The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts
For two decades, Tom Demarco has been writing in plain, narrative English about improving IT project team productivity. In this book, he describes some of the reasons for our failures, reasons most of us know about - but rarely do anything about.
Pick a chapter. Let's say "Bring Back the Door". Some of us remember the days when we worked in an office with a door, the days when it was taken for granted that engineers needed a quiet, low-distraction environment to focus on their work. Alas, those days are gone and the cubicle farm has become so noisy and distracting that many people find they can be the most productive only when no one else is around. As DeMarco says: "As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it's not worth improving anything but the workplace."
The best part of this book is in Part IV - Growing Productive Teams. The agricultural analogy is purposeful - "growing" productive teams takes time, care and feeding. One of the harmful "Teamicides" DeMarco discusses is the fragmentation of time, the requirement that most engineers work on multiple projects at the same time. If management wants to get the productivity that is derived from 'jelled teams', they have to know that "no one can be a part of multiple jelled teams", he says.
The book is a fast, easy read. The prescriptions for achieving greater team productivity aren't fast or easy. But you have to start somewhere. To start, read this book. |
|
|
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
If you're a software manager, and you haven't read Peopleware, stop reading this, and go read that instead. It's that's good. If you're a developer or engineer on a team that's not getting anything done, read it. This book is filled with practical advice on teams, team building, and getting work done.
Peopleware doesn't go in for theory. It puts into words what any contemplative manager already knows intuitively. The benefit of this book, however, is that it provides concise, powerful evidence to support each of its statements on team building and managing creative people. Peopleware covers it all - why you have high turnover, why you have low productivity, and how to get your team to "jell."
The design of the book is excellent. There are 34 chapters in 226 pages. The cover struck me as funny on such a thin book: "Eight all new chapters." How did they fit all that into such a thin book? Simple: each chapter is very focused and short - an entire chapter on a concept can be read in a single sitting - even by the busiest manager. I recommend you read a chapter first thing in the morning, keep the ideas in your mind all day, and then read that chapter again in the evening. It will help you get the most out of what the book has to offer.
Part one focuses on managing people. It describes how development is different from manufacturing, what motivates people, and some of the pitfalls. It also focuses on you, the manager, and your role in the success of your project. Part 2 zeros in on environment. DeMarco and Lister single out environment as one of the biggest sources of problems in development. As such, they devote more time to this than any other subject in the book. It can get a bit repetitive, but the points they make are important, so it is easy to forgive them for focusing on it so much.
Parts 3, 4, and 5 address people, teams, and work methods. These areas may be of the most immediate value to a beleaguered manager, as it is here that they have the most opportunity to make changes, and where they typically have the least training. The authors focus on how to work with individuals, move on to making teams "jell," and finally on how to make work more meaningful and dynamic to reduce turnover, which Peopleware labels as "a cancer."
|
|
|
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
If you create software, work with people who do, or most especially if you manage people who do, please read this book. This is great stuff. The description of a jelled (effective) team is powerful. I've had the pleasure of working on such a team, and I hope that if you haven't, after you read about what it's like, you will get out there and work to make a team like it. This book describes how things ought to be, how they're not, and what you can do to bring them closer to the ideal so that you and your team can do quality work in a reasonable timeframe. Well worth the money. |
|
|
Metcalf (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
To prevent becoming one of those clueless bosses, spend an afternoon or two and commit this book to memory. It's right for any office-based, technical business, not just software development. |
|
|
Ethann Castell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Fantastic book about the people side of software development. The ideas in this book, and 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 concepts in 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, and 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 brought in bucket-loads of sand to make his office into a beach !
If you are a manager then read this book and implement as much as you can. Otherwise buy a copy and leave it on your Managers desk. |
|
|
|
1 2 | Total 2 pages 15 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
