Michael Kennedy, Kent Harmon, Ed Minnock
Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota's set-based learning for developing products and nobody can catch you.

This is a continuation of the book I reviewed earlier this year: Product Development for the Lean Enterprise. The authors pick up the story of the Infrared Technologies Corporation (IRT) a year later. The company has piloted bits and pieces of the Toyota System with various levels of success. The progress is visible but it is not sufficient to achieve the company goals. To make matters worse, the Board of Directors has run out of patience with IRT's poor financial performance and has hired a new Chief Financial Officer to improve profits fast. The new CFO does not believe in product development transformation efforts and recommends a different strategy: selling non-profitable side of business, outsourcing manufacturing, reducing cost through an across-the-board workforce reduction, and using profits to buy high-growth and high-profit companies...

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Design Patterns is one of my favourite technical books of all time. It has been highly influential on my understanding of object-oriented design and software engineering principles in general. It helped me hone my skills as a software architect early in my career and now serves as a reference material for many of my training sessions.

This book catalogs 23 commonly used design patterns:

• Creational
  Abstract Factory, Builder, Factory Method, Prototype, and Singleton
• Structural
  Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Facade, Flyweight, and Proxy
• Behavioral
  Chain of Responsibility, Command, Interpreter, Iterator, Mediator, Memento, Observer, State, Strategy, Template Method, and Visitor

Jeffrey Liker and David Meier
Toyota Talent: Developing Your People The Toyota Way

I am leading a product development team at a financial organization. One of my objectives is to create an environment supporting and motivating team members to learn all jobs within the team and continuously improve our work methods. This may not be an easy goal to achieve, but I see a huge value in having team members capable of performing multiple jobs and willing to assume different roles and responsibilities.  

While I was exploring ideas on how to organize training and skill development for our employees, I came across Jeffrey Liker's and David Meier's book describing an approach to training used by Toyota. At Toyota, managers and team leaders are responsible for establishing a teaching environment within their teams. They create development plans for their team members, work closely with the trainers to evaluate the progress and skill level of each individual, and keep an eye on the overall performance indicators.

Mike Cohn
Agile Estimating and Planning

Mike Cohn is an Agile Alliance co-founder, Information Technology executive, and the author of two excellent books: "User Stories Applied" and "Agile Estimating and Planning". His first book became de facto standard for creating user stories. His second book is often described as one of the best practical guides to estimating and planning agile projects. I really like and recommend both of Mike's books.

Estimating and Planning are necessary non-value adding activities on a software project. They are non-value adding because they do not add a direct value to the final product as perceived by the customer. They are necessary because the consequences of not doing estimating and planning are dire: we would end up with no data to support any quality decision-making process on the project. When is the project going to be done? What can we have completed by a certain date? Should we release now or shall we wait another month and release with more features?

Gerald M. Weinberg
The Secrets of Consulting: A guide to giving and getting advice successfully

As a consultant, I find it illuminating and resourceful as it puts rationality and structure around seemingly irrational subject area. As a manager, I find it full of wisdom and wit, but perhaps lacking clear message and specific take-aways. As a reader, I simply find it entertaining. What am I talking about? "The Secrets of Consulting" book by Jerry Weinberg.

Jerry defines consulting as the art of influencing people at their own request. Even this definition alone makes me think hard and deep about my role as a consultant... or as a person who needs consulting help. In a casual conversational manner, Jerry introduces rules and laws helping a consultant become more effective and ultimately more successful at what she/he does.

Michael N. Kennedy
Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's system is four times more productive and how you can implement it.

I first learned about Toyota production and product development around 5 years ago. Their numbers are truly impressive:

• Toyota is consistently named at the top in owner satisfaction surveys
• Toyota's  milestone dates are never missed
• Toyota's engineers and managers achieve incredible 80% of value-added productivity (vs. 20% auto industry average in the US)

Norman L. Kerth
Project Retrospectives. A handbook for team reviews.

In my consulting practice, I see many teams working very hard, constantly in a rush trying to save the day, making the most out of every single minute they have... and never having enough time to stop and think about how they perform. Retrospectives provide a formal way for teams to get away from their daily grind and take some time to reflect on their performance, seek an opportunity to learn and get better.

In his book, Norman Kerth does an excellent job guiding readers on how to plan, prepare, and facilitate an effective retrospective on project performance. He describes a very thorough approach to how to prepare for a retrospective in a situation when you are an outsider and do not know the details and history behind the project. He spends quite a bit of time discussing how to make a retrospective safe for all participants and provides valuable methods for extracting related project data and capturing lessons learned.

Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

A well written book on the subject of software design. The authors describe fundamental object-oriented principles, dig into a few design patterns, and even touch on agile methods while providing easy-to-follow examples in C#. Reading this book is like spending a day working together with a team of software developers where you can observe their development practices first hand.

While this book is not likely to become one of the classical books people have on their shelves, I recommend it to any .NET developer. Advanced readers will also benefit from taking a closer look at a couple of additional resources:

• c2.com wiki page on principles of OO design - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrinciplesOfObjectOrientedDesign
• Robert Martin's articles on the same subject - http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArticles.html

Eric Evans
Domain Driven Design

I met Eric in August of 2004, when his book had just came out and he was here at OTUG talking about Ubiquitous Language, a language used by team members to describe the domain model.

By then I had been doing object-oriented programming for awhile and the object-oriented principles felt natural to me. Yet my solutions often felt a bit too technical... Domain-Driven Design helped me learn how to explore a complex domain and express it with a comprehensible software model. It helps me focus on central business problems while keeping the overall design of the systems understandable and manageable.

Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects

A very good, enjoyable book on the subject of risk management in software development.  The authors did an excellent job introducing the concepts of risk and uncertainty and will help you and your team lay a good foundation for discovering, assessing, and planning risks on your software projects.

The book comes with the Riskology Simulator available for download from http://www.systemsguild.com/riskology/. The simulator is pre-filled with five core risks using industry-wide data and allows you to quickly create an uncertainty diagram showing the impact of risks on your project. The simulator can be customized to meet your specific needs by adding your own risk factors or by overriding the core risks with your company's data.

I recommend this book to anybody interested in software project management.