This book is a collection of 24 well-written papers on software development that were first published in early 2000 in The Rational Edge, the e-zine of Rational (now part of IBM). The papers cover the areas of software development, its project management, and the human elements involved.

The beauty of this book is that, although these papers are grouped into six logical parts, you can still open the book and read them one at a time in any order. That said, these papers seem to have been written at different times for different audiences, so not all of them will appeal to everybody. The writing makes for enjoyable easy reading, since the text never delves too deeply into a subject. Unfortunately, this is the biggest drawback of the book, since these e-zine papers are written for a generic audience, and never really go very deeply into the exploration of any particular software topic.

If you are an experienced software development manager or project manager, avoid this book. Although you may still enjoy reading it, you will probably not gain any new knowledge: you would feel like you were reading someone’s blog on software development. Although this is definitely not a how-to book by any means, if you are an inexperienced software team leader or project leader, or are not an information technology (IT) manager, these papers will create a simplistic awareness of several issues apparent in software development. The book could also serve as auxiliary reading in a course for non-IT managers.