The Books I Read in 2021: Part 5
About This Series
In 2021, I started a new job as the manager of the front-end reporting team on the electronic health records implementation programme at Guy's and St Thomas'. This was my first time managing a team, and my first time working on a programme rather than in a business-as-usual role. I was both excited, but also anxious - and so my usual coping mechanism of buying books kicked in!
Now, a year after our go-live, I want to look back at some of the books I read at the time, and what I took from them.
- Title: The Mythical Man-Month
- Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
- Publication Date: I read the 1995 anniversary edition. The original was published in 1975.
- How did I hear about it: Referenced in both Nadia Eghbal’s book and Steve McConnell’s book.
This seems to be universally acknowledged as the classic on software development projects. Not bad for a book written in 1975!
There are wonderful things here:
- The exploration of why programming is so compelling, and yet so hard to monitor, measure and capture. “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.”
- The analysis of the conditions in which adding more people to a project causes it to become later. This is sometimes flattened into the aphorism “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”, but in the book Brooks specifies that this is phenomenon arises in projects with particular properties, such as high co-ordination cost.
- The importance of estimation as a skill for technologists.
- “How, then, shall teams communicate with one another? In as many ways as possible.”
- “The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.”
- Version control. It is astonishing that we still have to make the argument for version control, especially in a regulated industry like healthcare. But we do - and the fundamentals of the argument are here.