Software development at my place of employment supposedly follows the Agile model. Fail Fast Fail Forward and all that sort of stuff. When I entered the IT field iterative waterfall was kind of the standard so I am always trying to catch up on Agile methodology. As part of that effort I recently read (like finished it on Christmas morning recent) Rolling Rocks Downhill by Clarke Ching.
The premise of the novel is simple enough. A software project at a Scottish Financial Services firm is failing to deliver on time and meet it's performance targets. The head of the department must develop a new way of doing business in order to decrease delivery times and the number of bugs associated with each release. He does this by rediscovering the Theory of Constraints (as outlined in The Goal) and extrapolating lean / agile software development practices thru the help of a mysterious mentor who appears occasionally and guides him to his discoveries by pointing out problems the company cafeteria used to have that relate in small ways to the problems he is having.
In most ways this book is identical to The Phoenix Project only the particular software development process is different, oh and Bill in The Phoenix Project spends all his mentoring time in a brake pad manufacturing plant, instead of in a kitchen eating bacon. (Bill got gypped). It's not a bad book, and it guides you through the fundamentals of the subject well enough. I just always wonder how entire departments of people can be so blind that some of the very obvious solutions that occur havent been thought of numerous times before.
I will say reading this book had me breaking out The Phoenix Project again, and now that is driving me to read The Goal again. It's a vicious cycle.
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