Rapid Development is a book written by Steve McConnell that I decided to take a chance on after I enjoyed reading Code Complete.
If you work in software development, whether as a developer, a tester, a manager, or as a business analyst, buy this book! I got this book 2nd hand for £5. It’s such a steal I feel like I’ve just robbed someone. This book will give you a MUCH better understanding of how to run a successful project. And that is what we all want.
Don’t just take my word for it either. Take a look at all the other customer reviews you can find for it on your favourite online book retailer.
Criticisms:
There are a couple of factual errors or misleading statements in this book as pointed out in chapter 2 of “Leprechauns in Software Engineering” by Laurent Bossavit.
Also this book was written 5 years before the Agile Manifesto and has no coverage of any Agile framework.
I will be updating this review with specific comments on each section.
Part 1 Efficient Development
- Welcome to Rapid Development
- Rapid Development Strategy
- Classic Mistakes
- Software Development Fundamentals
- Risk Management
- Core Issues in Rapid Development
- Lifecycle Planning
- Estimation
- Scheduling
- Customer-Oriented Development
- Motivation
- Teamwork
- Team Structure
- Feature-Set Control
- Productivity Tools
- Project Recovery
- Change Board
- Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Designing for Change
- Evolutionary Delivery
- Evolutionary Prototyping
- Goal Setting
- Inspections
- Joint Application Development (JAD)
- Lifecycle Model Selection
- Measurement
- Miniature Milestones
- Outsourcing
- Principled Negotiation
- Productivity Environments
- Rapid-Development Languages (RDLs)
- Requirements Scrubbing
- Reuse
- Signing Up
- Spiral Lifecycle Model
- Staged Delivery
- Theory-W Management
- Throwaway Prototyping
- Timebox Development
- Tools Group
- Top-10 Risks List
- User-Interface Prototyping
- Voluntary Overtime
Part 2 Rapid Development
Part 3 Best Practices
Part 3 Best Practices
Zombie Code Kill 