Gojko Adzic

I recently came across two books that fit the Building software that matters theme perfectly, and deserve to be read by anyone managing a software project, running a development team or generally serious about delivering software. Both books tackle topics so difficult that development teams often just push the responsibility for them to the customer, expecting some kind of magical resolution. Continue Reading »

Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce is a TDD book, but unlike any other on the market today. First of all, the book deals mostly with advanced unit testing topics, such as designing tests for readability and mocking, and addresses many common stumbling points that people experience with unit testing a few years after they started their journey, such as applying unit testing in multi-threaded and asynchronous environments. Second, it explains and demonstrates in practice the dynamics of designing software through TDD, which is still a dark art for many programmers. And third, it gives the reader insight into Freeman’s and Pryce’s brains, which is why this book is a must-read for anyone serious about unit testing, even to people that have been doing it in the last century. Continue Reading »

It has been a while since I published a book review on this blog, not because I stopped reading but because none of the books that I read meanwhile really stood out. I’m glad to say that Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory finally breaks that trend – it is truly a great book and definitely a must read for anyone serious about quality in agile projects. Continue Reading »

It has been a while since I published a book review on this web site. I have read a lot of books in the mean time, but none of them seemed worth to recommend. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran not only captured my attention, it also captured my imagination.
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Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

The central theme of this book is how the IT industry resembles an asylum taken over by inmates – with software products completely missing the goals of their customers due to a combination of programmer psychology and sales-driven feature explosion. Alan Cooper argues that programmers drive the development process using their own image as a guideline, and overloading the software with features which require expert knowledge. On the other hand, sales and marketing push for features that can be used by beginners in order to expand the customer base. Most of the software users are, according to Cooper, ‘perpetual intermediaries’, so their needs are not addressed at all. Cooper advocates fighting back against this unnecessary complexity and refusing to give in to the mass craziness. His proposed solution is interaction design, a relatively new design practice focused on improving the way users access software. Continue Reading »