Author/s : Peter Eeles, Peter Cripps
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category : Project Management, Process and Best Practices
Review by : Jan de Boer
Rating : 6 horseshoes
Ah sorry but I really do not like this book. Now first I must say, I can have very different opinions then the crowd. Sometimes I dislike movies for example that other love. I can remember a movie called oceans' number 12, I think. Lots of famous stars in it, but I just hated it. I can remember certain music records as a teenagers my friends loved, I hated them. I am kinda strange and independent.
But what I don't like about the book is, what I already stated in the previous post, it tries to over define all kinds of things. I don't like that because the process of architecture, software development, uses very inconsistent vocabulary. But if this is the case, why not just agree on the fact that these words are used in a different way in different environments? Why on every term quote all kinds of books? Just agree to disagree, and try to explain certain pitfalls and good practises by some examples instead? Also the definitions are useless I think when in all software developing environments they are used differently.
You should know what it means in
your environment, and this is not the same as tried in any book anyway.
Then it gives a certain empty cabinet, procedures you could follow. But if I work in a company, this is mostly already decided for me, in a method the company has chosen. And the exact organization of the shells is not that important. It is important you put something logical inside it. And then it kicks in some open doors like: this procedure could be simpler if your project is small, and more thorough if the project is complicated. Now really? And also it comes with remarks like: the order of the process in not exactly defined. Yes I know that too. It never is.
So it really did not tell me much new stuff. And what it did told me, was packed in what I think a over academic style that in the end really irritated me. In fact, I stopped reading the book at page 260 of about 300. I learned a few new terms from it. There is a check list as appendix I think is useful to check if you have thought of everything. But I would rather read a book that tells me what I can put 'on the shells of the cabinet'. The books states that this is not such a book and that there are other books who explain design and architecture paradigms. I think I will read those books then.
I will still give it a six, since it's not badly written or something. In the fact that there are a lot of errors in it. But I find the aim of the book useless, and the style over academic. Again and again some quote from some study like the writers want to prove they read all those....
Sorry!!