Advice So Practical, It Makes you Wonder Why SPI Is So Hard!
Rating:
5 / 5
This book is simply fantastic. Neil Potter and Mary Sakry show you, simply and clearly, how to tie your process improvement activities to the things that matter in your business. Rather than an onerous "why are we improving for improvement sake", this book shows how to find what hurts, make it better and raise maturity regardless of what improvement model you may use. The book can be read in about an hour, and there are many appendicies that provide practical and easy to understand examples. Reading the book doesn't make process improvement easy (change is never easy), but it puts you down the right path. The best chance of institutionalizing real process improvement is through solving the real problems of the company and its employees and customers.I especially recommend that company executives read this book, since they often set the tone for a process improvement effort. This book is a must read for anyone heading up a process improvement practice.
Tells you how to "just do it"
Rating:
5 / 5
The development of quality software has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks ever to arise in the brains of humans. With so many ways to fail and so few paths to success, there is not a single software shop without a great deal of room for improvement. However, determining that a shop needs to improve is about as difficult as hitting the ground if you slip on ice. The hard part is identifying where the changes should be made and making sure that real change is done rather than some simple shuffling of resources or pointless changing of names.
That point is where this book becomes valuable. It is a concise document, describing in broad, but not excruciatingly fine detail how to improve processes for managing the construction of software. The names of the chapters summarize the basics of any well-constructed process: developing a plan, implementing the plan and checking progress. It also gives you sound advice as to how to track the changes in the process, so important to convince those doing the changing that what you are doing is in their interest.
I recommend that all managers of software development projects examine this book. It will also show you how to stay on track, as it is all too easy to find excuses to significantly deviate from any plan.
UN-common sense strategies
Rating:
5 / 5
This is one of those books that you'd think would be common sense knowledge, but isnt. I've been working in process improvement for 22 years and this is the first book I've found that collects all of the strategies I've found successful in one place!The book starts by showing how easy it is to get "lost in the trees" (and kill a bunch of them in the process) if you try to "do CMM" like most people do the first time around. The authors do a great job of showing how to keep the main thing (delivering better quality software) the main thing and avoid creating mountains of useless documentation. I would recommend that anyone looking at achieving higher levels of maturity in CMM, SPICE, or ISO 9000 read this and take a reality check on their plans.
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