Great Software Debates

The industry’s most outspoken and insightful critic explains how the software industry REALLY works.

In Great Software Debates, Al Davis, shares what he has learned about the difference between the theory and the realities of business and encourages you to question and think about software engineering in ways that will help you succeed where others fail.

In short, provocative essays, Davis fearlessly reveals the truth about process improvement, productivity, software quality, metrics, agile development, requirements documentation, modeling, software marketing and sales, empiricism, start-up financing, software research, requirements triage, software estimation, and entrepreneurship. He will get you thinking about:

• The danger of following trends and becoming a ‘software lemming’
• Is software development art or engineering?
• How to survive management mistakes
• The bizarre world of software estimation
• How to succeed as software entrepreneur
• How to resolve incompatible schedules and requirements

If you are in the software industry and do not know which way to turn, Great Software Debates provides valuable and insightful advice. Whether you are a software developer, software manager, software executive, entrepreneur, requirements writer, architect, designer, or tester, you will find no shortage of sound, palatable advice.

ALAN M. DAVIS is a prolific author with over twenty-five years’ experience consulting for over 100 major corporations worldwide including Boeing, Cigna Insurance, Federal Express, General Electric and the Software Productivity Consortium. He is currently a professor of information systems at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He was president of Omni-Vista, Inc., a vice president at BTG, Inc., and a director of R&D at GTE Communication Systems. He was a member of the board of directors for Requisite, Inc., acquired by Rational Software Corporation in 1997, and subsequently acquired by IBM in 2003. He is the author of 201 Principles of Software Development, Software Requirements: Objects, Functions and States, Second Edition, and Just Enough Requirements Management.