“Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself“ wasn’t the best written/edited book, but has some tasty bits scattered within the random acronyms. It reads like the storytellings of a retiring, experienced, software manager at a large corporation. Someone telling the inside story in a blunt, matter-of-fact approach. Personally, I like that style. It gets to the point without dancing around the subject. The only caveat with this book though, is that some of the advice is a little too specific to the author’s previous corporate environments. Still, if you’re stuck at an airport and this is what the local bookstore has, it’s not a bad choice.

A few quotes:

“Quality work is not done by mistake.”

“When developers are simultaneously assigned to several projects, they have split loyalties and their teammates cannot rely on them for support and assistance.”

“It is hard for someone to feel committed to a project when management is unwilling to make it their principal job.”

“Discipline, in fact, is what separates the experts from the amateurs in any professional field.”

“The team leader must motivate, coach, drive, and urge the members to perform to the best of their abilities.”

“If you don’t change the engineers’working practices, you can change the organizational structure and all its procedures, but nothing much will really change. Thus, to have a substantial impact on an organization’s performance, you must change the way the engineers actually work.”

“Even when the result is a total business disaster, if the team provided a rewarding personal experience, the team members will view the project as a success.”

“When people say they are working harder, they actually mean they are working longer hours.”

“Designing, coding, reviewing, inspecting, and testing are intensely difficult tasks. To have any hope of producing quality products, we must occasionally take breaks.”

“Often, teams respond to this pressure by taking shortcuts, using poor methods, or gambling on a new (to them) language, tool, or technique.”

“Every day that you wait to act is a day that you can’t use to solve the problem.”

“The most important single asset a software engineer can have is a reputation for meeting commitments.”

“The most successful teams have energetic, enthusiastic, confident, and hard-driving leaders. If you don’t have the required energy and drive, figure out what to change so that you do. If you can’t see how to do that, either your team has a hopeless job or it needs a new leader.”

“A significant part of your leadership job is to keep the team’s goals clear and well defined and to ensure that every team member knows how his or her current tasks contribute to meeting that goal.”

“It is impossible to be an effective leader without being committed to a cause that animates you and motivates your followers.”