Hello! I'm looking for a few great books to improve my skills at Software Project Management. Essentially, I want to learn more about building up a project from scratch - I'm hoping for something that covers information & requirements gathering and project conception, but would welcome any resources you have found to be helpful on the topic.
Thanks all!
Top comments (7)
Hello. It will be completely unfashionable. I was at the cricket yesterday with a friend who seems obsessed with Agile Scrum as a methodology. He works with the SAFe methodology - Scaled Agile Framework. I told him before, and he never did, to read the following book.
"Software Project Survival Guide" by Steve Mcconnell.
The reason this book is so vital, is because it puts across the following key approaches;
1 It is better to lose 10% of a project spend on discovering it won't work, than to spend 300% on a failure. People reinvent this as fail fast, fail early in agile - but it is nothing new.
2 That software upstream changes are 200 times more expensive than downstream phases. i.e. post release in a go-live situation, adding new features/requirements is expensive.
3 Milestones and phases are important.
4 It doesn't advocate heavy, laboured requirements gathering. By taking the milestone/phased approach, you don't have to be completely tied to specifications.
This book is like a red-pill. It won't be the way 99.9% of projects are run - but if you want to make sure you get value for money, read it.
What is incredible, is agile is more process based, less innovative for developers and is limited by the user's own knowledge on the capabilities. So, take a look at the book I recommend. For me, as a software engineer - I still believe it is the best mindset to have for any implementation.
I'll check it out, thank you! I do like to follow a sort of Agile methodology, thought not strict as some people can be. I'll probably really enjoy this book!
Sure. An Agile mindset is not the same as an agile methodology. Certainly, I wouldn't be beating myself up over not being the purest follower of agile :).
Hopefully it will be a breath of fresh air to what the common narrative is.
I think “The Phoenix Project” is sort of one of the canonical reads on this general subject. I think it’s a bit over-hyped, but it is so widely recommended, it’s worth reading as part of a repertoire.
That's definitely on my list! Thanks!
While i don't think it quite fits your bill I learned some good things from 'Hello, Startup' that I just finished reading. It is focused on startup businesses' product, tech stack and teams.
I'll add it to my library list, you're right that it doesn't sound exactly like what I want here but it does sound like it'll be an interesting and valuable read. Thank you!