Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure.

Why peopleware?

Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions.

Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy.

I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too.

Acknowledgments
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition

Part 1: Managing the Human Resource
Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing
Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger
Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You
Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits
Chapter 5: Parkinson’s Law Revisited
Chapter 6: Laetrile

Part II: The Office Environment
Chapter 7: The Furniture Police
Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5"
Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space
Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects
Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time
Chapter 11: The Telephone
Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door
Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps

Part III: The Right People
Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor
Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler
Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here
Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System

Part IV: Growing Productive Teams
Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
Chapter 19: The Black Team
Chapter 20: Teamicide
Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner
Chapter 22: Open Kimono
Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation

Part V: It’t Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here
Chapter 24: Chaos and Order
Chapter 25: Free Electrons
Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk

Part VI: Son of Peopleware
Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited
Chapter 28: Competition
Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs
Chapter 30: Making Change Possible
Chapter 31: Human Capital
Chapter 32:Organizational Learning
Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is
Chapter 34: The Making of Community

Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors