The 5 Books Every IT Manager Should Read Right Now - IT Management Must-Read Books: Perfect Software

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Perfect Software and Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg. And then there’s Jerry Weinberg, who has forgotten more about IT project management and software engineering than most of us will every know – and he doesn’t forget much. I could have picked any number of his books – and almost picked The Psychology of Computer Programming (which you should read anyway) – but Weinberg just came out with Perfect Software, which tackles a subject I feel passionately about, namely the issues of quality engineering in major IT projects.

Weinberg’s style is to tell stories and then capture the essential truths into clear, simple statements. His focus always encompasses the human factors that overwhelmingly dominate IT systems development. In Perfect Software, Weinberg turns that focus onto why we test software, how we test software, and where we usually go wrong.

Each chapter ends with a list of common mistakes – one of my favorites is “Confusing documents with facts.” As with the other four books above, this is a book that you should carefully read and ask yourself, “Where are we making these mistakes?”

There’s your list. These five books together make a stack less than 3” high and comprising about 1100 pages – which is to say, a bit shorter than some of those massive programming language tutorials. But unlike those tutorials, which will likely become outdated within a few years and be thrown out not long after that, these five books will be useful and meaningful for decades to come.

But only if you read them.

 

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Bruce F. Webster is an international IT consultant. You can reach him at bwebster@bfwa.com or via his websites at brucefwebster.com and bfwa.com.  

[© 2008 by Bruce F. Webster]

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