Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
May/June 2004

Book Review: Managing Development

by Richard Mateosian
Senior Member, Berkeley Chapter

Following up on last month's DMV theme, project management, I went back and looked at an article I wrote for the Nov/Dec 2001 issue of IEEE Micro. I've extracted a few brief reviews of books on project management from that article. Most of these books focus on software development, a process that many technical communicators participate in indirectly. We can all benefit from understanding how to make that process work smoothly.

Exploring Requirements—Quality Before Design by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg (Dorset House, New York, NY, 1989, 320pp, ISBN 0-932633-13-7, $50.45)

Editor’s note: This was one of the books mentioned in Jon Rude’s article, Helping Make Projects Work—Common-Sense Practices, in the last issue of DMV.

The biggest problem with software development is knowing exactly what to build. Communication between developers and their customers faces many obstacles:

• different assumptions and terminology
• intermediaries with their own assumptions and understanding
• failure to understand and respect each other's expertise
• insufficient time to build a common understanding of the desired final product
• all the ambiguities of natural languages

A charming example of the last point is the authors' Mary Had a Little Lamb heuristic, which encourages you to substitute synonyms for the words in a requirement. For example, Mary cheated an unsophisticated investor; Mary gave birth to a small good-natured child; Mary dined sparingly on mutton stew.

A misunderstanding can cost a great deal to correct after the product is finished but very little to correct before the design phase begins. This more than justifies the cost of defining requirements carefully.

Fifteen years after it first appeared, this book is completely relevant to today's development projects. Gause and Weinberg call on their many years of consulting experience to provide practical techniques for exploring requirements. That is, they show you ways to discover and overcome ambiguity, distinguish between requirements and preferences, and push back against constraints. They show you how to tell when you're done and how to translate requirements into acceptance tests. They even give you ways to make meetings more productive.

Given the frequent disconnect between "what the customer wanted" and "what the engineers built"—the subject of a well-known cartoon—most companies would benefit greatly from improvements to the way they define requirements. This book is just what the doctor ordered. I recommend it to anyone who has anything to do with software development.

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2000 ed by Project Management Institute (PMI, Newtown Square, PA, 2000, 228pp, ISBN 1-880410-23-0, $35.95)

Project management professionals apply a variety of theories and practices to their work—some experimental, others tried and true. The combined lore of these professionals constitutes a large body of knowledge.

The PMBOK Guide, as this book is known in project management circles, identifies and describes the subset of that body of knowledge that the Project Management Institute deems "generally accepted." It does not teach this body of knowledge, but it provides an excellent map, a well-organized skeleton with a little flesh on the bones.

This is a basic reference for anyone seeking certification in project management. It is also a helpful guide for anyone seeking to understand the underlying model of that ubiquitous but inscrutable tool, Microsoft Project. If you use Microsoft Project, but don't always understand what it's doing, read this book.

While this book is basic, if your interest is in a specific aspect or field of project management, you should also look at more narrowly focused books.

Information Technology Project Management by Kathy Schwalbe (Thomson/Course Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2000, 512pp, ISBN 0-7600-1180-X, $53.95)

The PMBOK guide is a scant 228 pages. This book, at more than twice that length, seeks to flesh out the PMBOK and specialize it to a specific industry. Schwalbe writes in the format of a textbook, with discussion questions, exercises, and suggested readings. The layout and printing are not up to the standards of mainstream publishers, but if you can get past that, the book provides a great deal of information in an easy-to-assimilate format.

One very attractive feature of this book is that it uses Microsoft Project to develop class projects. Using Microsoft Project without understanding the underlying project management model can be confusing and difficult. The examples in this book help you avoid the confusion.

Special Edition Using Microsoft Project 2000 by Tim Pyron (Que, Indianapolis, IN, 2000, 1314pp plus CD, www.quepublishing.com, ISBN 0-7897-2253-4, $39.99)

This book is well organized, beautifully laid out and printed, well written, comprehensive, and insightful. The notes and cautions add real value by tapping into the author's extensive experience with the product.

The detailed table of contents reflects the logical structure, and the excellent index makes it easy to find information in this huge volume.

If anything can make Microsoft Project comprehensible, this book is it. I recommend it to anyone who wants to use the real power of this tool.

This review originally appeared in slightly different form in the Nov/Dec 2001 issue of IEEE Micro.
© Copyright 2000 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. All rights reserved.

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