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SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS OLD and a huge body of empirical research has grown up around the industry. Yet two thirds of all software projects fail. The average large
project is a year late, and the average small project estimate is off by more than 100%. The problems are well known and widely published, but project after project, company after company, we make the same mistakes over
and over again. Plan, estimate, schedule, manage - and when the going gets tough, throw it all away and code. Post-mortem examinations reveal the only truly universal strategy: start at the beginning, keep going until
you reach the end, and then stop. Rapid Development
is a grand tour of the classic problems of estimating, scheduling and project planning, focusing on delivering the product earlier. McConnell has assimilated a vast body of literature and summarised it in a single, epic tome, yet
Rapid Development
is more than a mere bibliographic encyclopaedia of software scheduling. McConnell writes with both clarity and the conviction of personal experience, devoting a third of the book to practical examinations of Best Practices. It's a testament to his writing style that you can plough through
Rapid Development from cover to cover, although the sheer body of facts, graphs, tables and case studies on display will quickly saturate even the most sponge-like brains. Like McConnell's previous book
Code Complete, this seems destined to become a classic reference work. |
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