Jensen is an expert on estimation methodologies for software development cost and effort, and he does an excellent job in communicating his vast expertise and experience.

The book analyzes, and emphasizes, the importance of a people-centric and motivational management style and the empowerment of communication skills and capabilities of team members in having an effective and efficient software development team.

The book is nicely written with many historical examples, and contains a nice commented review of the essential notions of the behavioral, leadership, and motivational dimensions of management, with special emphasis on the management of software development teams and groups.

Jensen also explores in detail the factors that make a software development environment productive, how to measure this productivity, and how to realistically estimate schedule and resource needs for future software development projects, including maintenance costs. The author presents and explains a series of estimators and mathematical models that will be very helpful to software project managers in this respect. As a matter of fact, the audience of the book includes all of the people involved in the software development industry and not only management professionals.

Readers have the possibility of downloading a macro-enabled Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that calculates the estimators analyzed in the book for use on their own software projects. I found this spreadsheet very helpful for understanding the material while reading the book.

In the words of the author: “It is amazing, maybe even frightening, that the model formulated in 1980 still produces realistic effort and schedule estimates independent of the development approaches of today.” This fact reflects, in my opinion, and in the author’s, a strong indication that the more important factors in effective industrial or large-scale software development project management are people, communication, and management rather than specific software technology approaches or methodologies. These have changed dramatically over recent decades, but the basic productivity gains have only changed linearly in the last decades (figure 4.1 in the text); the same project management errors that happened 30 years ago, unfortunately, still happen. Jensen clearly explains what these errors are and how to avoid them, and presents extensive discussion on the best environments for effective software development teams.

The book does a fine job in presenting what its subtitle says: “effective leadership and quantitative methods in software management”; it contains an extensive bibliography and a nice glossary at the end, and my only wish is that the author will consider reducing to some extent the repetition of content and definitions in a future, updated edition. This makes some chapters semi-independent, but does not help very much the didactic flow of the material.

All things considered, the book is a must for any software development professional, and I believe it will become a classic reference.

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