Book information

Target audience

The audience for this book is software professionals (students, engineers, researchers, managers…).

Brief summary

The book presents the fundamental facts and fallacies of software development. Some of the fallacies are quite controversial and the author states the reasons why he thinks like that. All the facts and fallacies are presented in the same way: fact/fallacy, controversy explanation and sources presentation. This gives great cohesion and helps to understand the book in a clear way.

Finding

The main objective is the explanation of those fundamental facts and fallacies that the title of the book indicates. As a Software Engineer I should remember the ones that I forgot or be surprised by them. Indeed, I think that the author seeks some controversy in some of these facts and fallacies.

Strengths

  • The book focuses on what are the facts and the fallacies, not how to solve the problems caused by them.
  • It offers lots of good quality information related to projects estimation. I specially liked the data contained in fact 8 about projects that run out of control.
  • In general, a great bibliographic work has been done.
  • Dedicating a complete chapter to Quality was a great decision. Especially by adding a definition for this elusive term.
  • In my opinion, fallacies are better written than facts. They provide a lot of valuable information to support the author’s claims. Moreover, references are very rich in studies carried out by different researchers.

Limitations

  • I was expecting more controversy, and I was specially interested in reading anecdotes surrounding that controversy. In the end, the author explains the controversy in an aseptic way, which takes the fun out of it. However, some of the fallacies (6, 8 and 9) contain the level of controversy I was looking for.
  • “It isn’t the author’s fault, but rather the fault of the software industry in general. Some of the data provided seems less than credible and the fact that there are only one or two research articles cited does not help to increase that credibility. As they say: big claims require big evidence.”. I wrote the previous limitation while reading the book, only to realize several chapters later that one of the facts complains about exactly the same subject.

Rating

3/5