Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects

I finished yesterday another great book: Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projectsfrom pragmatic series. This book is not theory book that leaves you with many questions and no idea how to move along. Instead, you get an good idea about how to develop software and manage software projects successfully.

The book introduces tools you can use to automate your work and how to put up development and testing environment for your team. It also gives hints about how to use these tools in politically ill projects.

One of the interesting things I found from this book were the topics about project management. Yes, you shouldn’t always do stunt tricks to get the projects you manage under your control. You don’t need any highly paid consultants or very expensive software systems to start creating the order if you currently have chaos. Of course, if you have death march project, then you should accept that nobody can save you and put your project in current timeframes or budget.

I suggest this book to all teams who want to improve their performance and raise the quality of their work. Of course, this book is not silver bullet, but it gets you started and gives you right direction.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Tools and Infrastructure
3. Pragmatic Project Techniques
4. Tracer Bullet Development
5. Common Problems and How to Fix Them
   Tip Summary
   Source Code Management
   Build Scripting Tools
   Continuous Integration Systems
   Issue Tracking Software
   Development Methodologies
   Testing Frameworks
   Suggested Reading List