Review By: Monique Navai
07/02/2002This book provides a well written engineering guide for applications designers and systems architects. The book delivers many valuable insights on improving development. Early sections of the book compare engineering to the 1840s California Gold Rush by providing clear examples of history repeating itself. This makes the book more interesting, and it is easy to follow the examples and relate them to the world of software development.

The book describes common problems and provides solutions through improving the coding process. It also explains how to use the requirements and design system architecture to support the development and quality of the code with unit testing and debugging. With every piece of history the book becomes more interesting and challenges engineers and developers to improve the quality of coding. The book also addresses scheduling--meeting deadlines while preserving quality standards.

The book also focuses on the team-based nature of successful software development. It defines a team’s role for each stage in the development process, beginning with initial requirements, design, and implementation. This book relates closely to engineers and is written for code developers; it is relevant for any software analyst or designer.

The author is an excellent storyteller. His ability to relate the engineering environment to the California Gold Rush is very effective. This historical angle makes the book more interesting, and the way he has provided the appropriate facts of history is impressive.

As soon as I finished the book, I recommended it to my staff. We have been experiencing many engineering issues, which I was not able to understand clearly until I read this book. The author offers excellent criteria for the success of the quality engineer. I recommend this book to any project manager who does not understand true engineering, and to any developer who is learning to code.

This book offers a process that can help make applications cost less and suffer fewer defects. While I learned more about engineering in this book, I also learned how important my job is as a quality assurance professional.