A must-have recipe book for building software Perhaps you can relate to this all-too common you know all about your software product?but could do with some help in understanding the strategic side of things. If so, this book is the one-stop resource you'll need in order to become a successful software entrepreneur. Patterns expert Allan Kelly provides you with the step-by-step route that needs to be followed in order to understand business strategy and operations. Each chapter starts out with a solid introduction and theoretical overview, which is then further illustrated with patterns and case studies, all aimed at helping you move into the management of software. Business Patterns for Software Development divulges strategies, operations, and structures for building successful software.
Allan Kelly has held just about every job in the software world, from system admin to development manager by way of programmer and product manager. Today he works helping teams adopt and deepen Agile practices, and writing far too much. He specialises in working with software product companies and aligning products and processes with company strategy.
He is the author of three books: "Xanpan - reflections on agile and software development" (https://leanpub.com/xanpan), "Business Patterns for Software Developers" and “Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile”; the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets (http://www.dialoguesheets.com), a regular conference speaker and frequent contributor to journals.
The introductory chapters are superb. Allan's clarity of thought and his prose while covering patterns in general, strategy and other concepts is some of the best I've read. It's a pleasure and shows how much energy passion and understand he has. Thus far it's an amazing book, and really it's worth reading for those sections alone.
The comes the patterns, the diagrams linking patterns are very well made, things are laid out in a clear manner, explanations are good and consistent.
But I had hoped for more than only baseline stuff. The book does a good job of establishing a starting point, a vocabulary for the most common concepts and shows that patterns do work in this context but I found nothing that gave me that deep "aha" moment of seeing clearly articulated and named something that I previously could not name or put my finger on.
My recommendation: Read the first "half" that's truly amazing and dip into the patterns on an as-needed/curious basis.