Does your book provide helpful hints on managing projects, especially for a entry-level programmer such as myself?
If not, we failed.
Will and I were fortunate (??) enough to work in a few start-ups that had little to no process in place, so we got to wade through the "fun" of figuring out what we needed to put into place. It's very different to come into a shop with an established process and have something to complain about and quite another to enter a shop that can't build it's own products! One shop had bought source code management software but hadn't installed it!
Now we work at SAS (the world's largest privately owned software company) and we're seeing that a lot of the same ideas are either already in place, or needed. We've helped to introduce Continuous Integration for instance, and it's been just as important at SAS as it was in the startups. Now we are working with test automation.
The idea behind the book is simple. What do you need to do to run a software shop. We've tried to boil down our experience to a simple form that you can pick up and use. We intentionally stayed language neutral, but provided language specific resources in the Appendix and on my web site
Resouce Pages Don't misunderstand though... this is a presentation of what worked for us. If you are an active thinker and reader, you'll probably add to what we've done in your shop. You'll keep parts and throw other bits out. There are a lot of very smart people out there thinking about process. I think our book is a great place to get started. But don't stop here.
