Review By: Monique Navai
09/11/2002Highsmith describes Software Management by illustrating how to create a supportive environment for application development. The book provides a detailed process for all departments, such as Project Management, Engineering, and Quality Assurance. He analyzes change from a broad perspective, including system thinking, project management, development, and clients. He provides a clear instruction from all phases of the project: the role of project manager, and the scope of the project, including the schedule and the budget. Highsmith loves climbing mountains, experience he metaphorically applies to projects. He describes how a project can succeed when following the proper planning. He also describes how projects can fail when they are allowed to exceed the project scope.

Highsmith provides the mission and the vision of the projects and departments. He has dedicated a chapter to project managers, developers, and quality assurance, and how they all interact with each other, in order to provide client satisfaction.

He also focuses on Strategy, and team network structure. He provides mechanistic system diagrams for every process and every department. He focuses on general issues within the application development, he also intends to help the project managers and the developers to take strategic action rather than fight the same battles again and again. He provides requirement management and processes.

Since I have received this book I have used it to understand the issues within our office and the application development issues that we are currently dealing with. I am the Director of the Quality Assurance Department; by reading the book I understood how to deal with the project managers and the unreasonable deadlines. Highsmith provides a great detail for the project managers and the lead developers; I recommend the book to all IT managers. The author provides a wide range of material, from variable declaration to software estimate and everything concerning software development. I enjoyed reading the chapter dedicated to Quality, and how important it is to understand Quality. I also highly recommended the book to our developers, since the book teaches them how they need to get clear communication with other departments such as Project Management and QA. This book is written for anyone within the application development.

This book is one of the best management books I’ve read, written in software development context. I recommend this book to anyone interested in success. He talks about plans, requirement documents, data models, project plans, vision statements, commitments, and responsibilities.

His book focuses on what we should keep doing, what we should change, and why. He provides a summary for every chapter, which makes the book more interesting. For someone like me, who will use the book over and over again, I can just look up the summary section and use his guidelines.

This is a strikingly clear, concise book. It is written for software development team leaders and managers, but it’s filled with enough common sense wisdom to appeal to anyone working in IT. The author is a Technology storyteller. I have enjoyed reading his book and have been able to apply his ideas within my own department.