Agile SCM 2005 - Reflecting back on the year in books

what is likely to become a classic. I find myself referring to this book at least weekly if not more often. The principles of object-oriented design relate not only to agility and software architecture, but also to good SCM solution architecture and sound principles of SCM .

My "runner's up" and "honorable mentions" for this one are:

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  • The Pragmatic Programmer , by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
  • Martin Fowler's Refactoring
  • Josh Kerievsky's Refactoring to Patterns (2005 Jolt award winner)
  • Michael Feather's Working Effectively with Legacy Code
  • Software Factories (2005 Jolt award winner)
  • Domain-Driven Design , by Eric Evans

This book isn't truly a classic (yet). I feel that it should be, and hope that it will be some day soon. I think it is a profoundly important book for all involved in software development/engineering to understand. If more businesses understood Armour's perspective about why "Software is not a product", but rather a medium for the capture of knowledge (and hence software development is a knowledge creation activity rather than a production manufacturing activity), they would find so much more in alignment between software products and services and Peter Drucker 's expansions on Deming's theory of profound knowledge that it might well revolutionize the way they choose to develop software.

Contradictory as it might seem, Armour's writing and "Laws of Software Process" are extremely well aligned with Agile methods and values. Anyone who considers themselves an Agile advocate would do well to read and understand this book.

My "Runner's up" for this one would have to be:

These may not be as well known as Kent Beck's seminal book on Extreme Programming Explained , but the above two books, along with Armour's are quite possibly the best out there for understanding much of the underpinnings of Agile methods. (Of course I'm leaving out Nonaka and Takeuchi's The Knowledge Creating Company and the existing literature on complex adaptive systems, but I can't fit everything in.)

Lean Software Development , by Tom and Mary Poppendieck (another winner of a 2004 Jolt award)

Agile Management for Software Engineering by David Anderson (2005 Business Blogging Award winner)

The Ascent of Man , by Jacob Bronowski

This is a book about neither CM nor Agility. It's not even about software development. It is a book about both science and humanity. And it's probably the book that had the most profound impact upon me of all the books I read during my high school years. I find myself regularly referring to it more and more as Agile development method keeps injecting the human focus on people and interactions into the art and science of software development.

Bronowski's book has a chapter called "Knowledge or Certainty" that is about dealing with the inherent uncertainty in some things, and also in attempts at absolute knowledge/power attempted without grounding in real feedback, ending up doing things that dehumanize ourselves and others.

Also, in the first chapter is a quote that:

Man ascends through the discovery of the fullness of his own gifts. What he creates along the way are monuments to the stages of his understanding of nature and of self."

I think the same is true of how we develop software and the iterative discovery and learning along the way about the system's real requirements, and the nature of the software development process itself and what software architecture can and cannot do to sustain both over time.

Robert reviews Laura Wingerd's Practical Perforce

Having just been published by O'Reilly in November 2005, Laura is the VP of Product Technology at Perforce and co-author with Chris Seiwald of one