Pegasus Book Club

This Amazon short is about improving the software development productivity. It contains techniques and methods to improve software development productivity. These techniques, if applied properly, could improve the efficiency of software professionals, software development teams and software organizations.

I have my M.Tech and B.Tech degrees in Industrial Engineering. I had worked as an Industrial Engineer for 2 years before becoming a software professional. After about 10 years in software development and after managing my share of projects, I found that many of the IE techniques could be successfully used in software development. One of main functions of an Industrial Engineer is productivity improvement. In this article, I have adopted some of the IE techniques and principles of productivity improvement and applied it to the software development activities.

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A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2^nd Edition)

Out of the millions of Web site that has mushroomed in the cyberspace in the recent years, only a very few are designed with usability in mind. There are many reasons for this such as lack of awareness, lack of management support, dearth of expertise to name a few. The book, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug is the second edition of one of the bestselling books on Web usability by the same name.

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Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

In this book, Joel Spolsky, a veteran software professional and author, presents 29 articles, which he feel represents the best of software writing during the period 2003-2004. Joel’s goal in bringing out this collection is to encourage software professionals to write better and to teach them how to write things that people want to read. Out of the 29, two are comic strips, one is a chapter from the programming guide of Ruby, and remaining 26 are articles on topics ranging from programming style to software outsourcing. Each chapter is introduced by Joel, but the introductions do not add much value except in the case of a few articles.

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In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, based on their study of forty-three of America’s best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, published the book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. The book described eight basic principles of management—basis for action, proximity to customer, autonomy and entrepreneurship, productivity through people, hands-on and value-driven, sticking to the core competencies, simple form and lean staff, and simultaneous loose-tight properties—that made these organizations successful. But a few years later, it became apparent that many of the organizations that Peters and Waterman had portrayed as the paragon of excellence were not as good as they believed.

Companies like Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang, Xerox, etc., all listed as excellent companies by Peters and Waterman, crashed, burned or closed shop along with many other organizations. The companies, the excellent ones, were supposed to do well and become more and more successful; but they stumbled, crashed and died. What went wrong? Who are to blame? Is there a common reason for the failures?

Merrill R. Chapman is a high-technology and software consultant who have done almost all jobs in the high-tech industry from programmer, salesman, sales engineer, marketing professional, product manager, consultant and so on for a number of companies including MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Microsoft, Novell, DataEase, Sun Microsystems, etc. According to Chapman, the high-tech companies burned down and closed shop because they failed to learn for the past mistakes (theirs and others) thereby making the same stupid mistakes again and again. In the book, In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, he chronicles the history of the high-tech industry during the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting the stupid mistakes made by the so called ‘excellent’ companies and how they perished because of their on foolish decisions and actions.

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