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Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. (Paperback)
by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister
| Category:
IT, Software, Technology |
| Market price: ¥ 378.00
MSL price:
¥ 338.00
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| 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. |
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Author: Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister
Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated
Pub. in: February, 1999
ISBN: 0932633439
Pages: 245
Measurements: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00530
Other information: 2nd edition
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- MSL Picks -
Tom DeMarco writes classics about software development. Peopleware (1987 but updated version has since come out) is about people who develop software. It's about you. What people are like - what works and what doesn't on topics such as working space, interruptions, how people work together in teams. What really goes on between 9 and 5, why, and what managers can help do to make it better. Don't expect coding theory in this one. Do expect common sense where DeMarco voices what people know but didn't say.
This book is full of information of things that current managers have forgotten. Every new project is wanted done with less money, less time and with higher quality than old projects, putting a lot of pressure to the project team. Managers do things that they believe is good for the project but actually damages the project (and the company) at long term.
Software as an industry used to be associated mostly with the USA and India, but China is becoming more and more addicted to this icon of new economy. With multinationals such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sony stepping up their efforts setting up R & D centers and out- sourcing/service giants such as Infosys, Tata and Wipro hiring thousands of Chinese engineers for their Chinese facilities, as well as the rise of local software players like Ufida and Kingdee thanks to a huge domestic market, software development is starting to assume an important role in the Chinese economy. We think this book is going to be of great value to the Chinese software firms.
Highly recommended for software development team leaders and managers, as well as frontline engineers and project managers. It’s also a book that should be distributed to engineers and managers in a software company.
(From quoting Harris and Luis)
Target readers:
Software development-team leaders and managers
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- Better with -
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The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition
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Tom DeMarco is an international management consultant with clients in numerous industries. His previous books include The Deadline (a business novel with more than 40,000 copies sold) and Peopleware (nonfiction, with more than 100,000 copies sold). He divides his time between New York City and Camden, Maine.
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From the Publisher:
Peopleware asserts that most software development projects fail because of failures within the team running them. This strikingly clear, direct book is written for software development-team leaders and managers, but it's filled with enough commonsense wisdom to appeal to anyone working in technology. Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister include plenty of illustrative, often amusing anecdotes; their writing is light, conversational, and filled with equal portions of humor and wisdom, and there is a refreshing absence of "new age" terms and multistep programs. The advice is presented straightforwardly and ranges from simple issues of prioritization to complex ways of engendering harmony and productivity in your team. Peopleware is a short read that delivers more than many books on the subject twice its size.
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| View all 15 comments |
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.
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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. |
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