I just finished this book a couple of nights ago.

It’s a unique book. Whereas most technical books tell you the nuts and bolts of how to use a particular language, library, etc., this book is the story of how a group of folks got together to do a software project in their spare time and what their experiences were. Their project was to develop a Java-based tool that helps programmers do the bookkeeping required for Personal Software Process (PSP), the software development process created by Watts Humphrey of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (same guy and group who came up with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)) .

Each of the team members had a full-time job so this was something they were doing part-time out of their own interest and presumably, because they deemed it would make an interesting story for a book. They knew each other in the past, mostly from working together at Rational, although one guy left the company during the course of the project, so they had to make adjustments in the way that they communicated and interacted.

Being that I’m not a software development process geek (i.e.: I’m into the more practical, nuts and bolts of software development rather than processes like PSP, RUP, XP, Scrum, etc…), a lot of this was a bit dry for me, because a lot of this is about “phases” and “artifacts” like UML diagrams. Also, the toolset that they were using was very different from what I work with on a daily basis (my job is all about UNIX but these guys were using Java on Windows with a few Rational tools like Rational XDE and Rational RequisitePro. They also used a collaborative application called Groove, which sounded somewhat interesting, but it’s Windows-only). But there was enough interesting little tidbits in there that I didn’t give up and I managed to finish the book.

All in all, not a super useful book to me, but if you’re interested in processes like RUP and PSP, then you may really enjoy this.