David's review
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
David's review
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg
David's review
rating:
bookshelves:
read-in-2008
In an effort to discover why software development is hard, Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of Salon.com, spent time embedded with the development team for Chandler, a personal information management desktop application intended to compete with Microsoft Outlook. In tracing the team's progress - or rather its stunning lack of progress - over the 4 years between 2001 and 2005, Rosenberg is partially successful in illuminating the various pitfalls that can waylay this kind of effort.
Though the book suffers from the problem identified by other reviewers - a lack of clarity about the target audience, with accompanying difficulties in hitting the right technical level, Rosenberg does manage to convey the perpetual lack of focus which bedevilled the project from the beginning. (Even now, in 2008, no widely useful product has resulted, and work continues towards whatever redefined objective the team has most recently embraced.)
Although the book is likely to kindle a spark of empat...more
Though the book suffers from the problem identified by other reviewers - a lack of clarity about the target audience, with accompanying difficulties in hitting the right technical level, Rosenberg does manage to convey the perpetual lack of focus which bedevilled the project from the beginning. (Even now, in 2008, no widely useful product has resulted, and work continues towards whatever redefined objective the team has most recently embraced.)
Although the book is likely to kindle a spark of empat...more
