If your team always delivers successful projects on time and with all planned and wished for features, then there’s probably no need to read this book. But since (insert huge number of failed projects here) projects fail or don’t get finished on schedule, chances are that you’re in one of those teams where some things just don’t feel right. You feel the need that something has to be changed or improve. This is where “Ship It!” comes to the rescue.
Though not being published until the end of the month, the Pragmatics already offer some sample excerpts for your reading pleasure. Just like “The Pragmatic Programmer” this book won’t tell you what to do, but will tell you what worked out for the authors. And reading through the sample excerpts I consider it as kind of the sequel to “The Pragmatic Programmer”.
The first one, “Develop in a Sandbox”, seems obvious to a lot of developers, but reading the Pragmatic Programmers mailing list for a while now, it seems that a lot of teams don’t (hopefully yet) use version control for their source. I had a similar experience in a company, where developers worked on a shared network volume. And if you were lucky and just saved your source, closed the editor of your choice and go out for a cuppa coffee, then in the meantime one of your fellow developers saved his changes. Later someone asks you where the feature is you implemented and things are starting to get messy. Well, a lot of you probably went through a developing hell like this, too.
The next excerpt talks about not experimenting with core technologies, using the build process as an example. Not too long ago I worked on a project that used make to build the Java source, run XDoclet (via Ant) and all that fancy stuff, and only two people really knew how that build worked and what to do to improve it. While I know how to deal with make, a lot of people in the project didn’t, because Java programmers tend to use Ant for their building pleasure. Well, some time later the build ran out of the box, without any network drives and such needed, and within a much shorter amount of time.
The List! Enough said ;)
Well, not exactly. The List is about tracking, estimating and prioritising the features of your project. So far I’ve seen both ways of The List, having one and not having one. Wanna guess which one is better?
While only having read through some sample excerpts, this book seems like a good read for every developer, unless you’ll skim through the table of contents and find that your team already does everything the authors recommend. While I see “The Pragmatic Programmer” as a collection of practices to develop the skills of you as a developer and your team as well, “Ship It!” takes it to the next level, the project(s) you work on and how to succeed with them. The authors encourage you to try the practices for yourself and adopt them, if you find them useful for your project. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this book, since I’m always keen to improve even those practices I/we’ve already adopted.