Dynamics of Software Development

Shipping great software can be done, insists McCarthy, and charts, in five sections, the progress from initial design to successful product. McCarthy is a software industry veteran and the director of the Microsoft Visual C++ development group.

McCarthy has distilled a veteran's hard-won know-how into 54 memorable, pragmatic maxims - short essays on defining, building, shipping, and marketing software successfully, whether commercially or in-house. With a grown-up wit that's by turns homespun and sophisticated, McCarthy tells you how to maintain your cool ("Don't Flip the Bozo Bit"), organize a crack team ("Get Their Heads into the Game"), analyze the customer and the competition ("Alone? A Market Without a Competitor Ain't"), handle uncertainty and schedule slips ("When You Slip, Don't Fall"), make commitments with integrity ("Be like the Doctors"), and stabilize the product so that you can ship it ("Don't Shake the Jell-O"). McCarthy shows you how to develop a marketing message and how to launch your product too, and in the appendix, he tells you how to hire smart people and keep them happy and productive. Along the way, McCarthy meditates on software aesthetics and familiar software development phenomena - the "death march to Egghead", burn-out, internecine quarrels, being lost in software, the software dream and successive awakenings, the self-critical customer. McCarthy's preoccupation with the dynamics of the process infected his brother, artist Patrick McCarthy, with a sense of the "rich, deep, psychocultural extravaganza" that is software development, and themes both humorous and dark emerge in the handsome illustrations for the book. You'll find Dynamics of Software Development as engrossing and exciting as software development itself. This book is destined to be read by software designers, developers, marketers, technical managers, and industry insiders for many years to come.