Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

by Scott Rosenberg

Black holes, snakes, dragons—the metaphors all daubed a layer of mythopoetic heroism over the most mundane of issues: how to schedule multiple programmers so that work actually got done. You could plug numbers into Bugzilla all day long; you could hold one meeting after another about improving the process. Software time remained a snake, and it seemed invincible.