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Summary: Add This to Your Software Development Library
Review: A fresh perspective and analogy for software development managers. If your challenged with the constraints of formal development practices in the midst of aggressive schedules, this book gives you the "know-why's" so that you can tailor your quality system to put your projects into turbo mode and deliver a quality product. Definitely add this one to accompany your Steve McConnell collection.
Rating:
Summary: Add This to Your Software Development Library
Review: A fresh perspective and analogy for software development managers. If your challenged with the constraints of formal development practices in the midst of aggressive schedules, this book gives you the "know-why's" so that you can tailor your quality system to put your projects into turbo mode and deliver a quality product. Definitely add this one to accompany your Steve McConnell collection.
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Summary: THE handbook for product development leaders.
Review: Don Reinertsen brings to life the cost-of-time impact on the product development process. It is this "hidden" cost that eludes most product developers and their management. We used his book extensively in the refinement of our Wolfpack product development process. If you're running a project or managing the entire process, keep this book on your desk!
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Summary: Very helpful with practical information
Review: Good broad coverage of many aspects of product management. Clear language; priciples are explained well. There is much that can be applied very practically. At times a little too theoretical, but overall very helpful.
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Summary: An invaluable guide
Review: I bought this and about five other books on product development. Without question, this was the best.Reinertsen has an effective writing style that is engaging and informative. His examples are relevant and illustrative; even when not immediately on point with my business, they helped me to understand a concept. The book builds on some fairly simple - but enormously powerful - tools including basic financial modeling and queuing theory. Reinertsen explains why the tools are relevant and how to employ them across a spectrum of businesses. He then uses the tools to substantiate some remarkable product development concepts that he presents later in the book. The book is - thankfully - devoid of pithy phrases and buzz words. It teaches methods and ways of thinking. It doesn't profess answers, but it has driven an enormous amount of our product planning and product development efforts. I haven't found a better book on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: An invaluable guide
Review: I bought this and about five other books on product development. Without question, this was the best. Reinertsen has an effective writing style that is engaging and informative. His examples are relevant and illustrative; even when not immediately on point with my business, they helped me to understand a concept. The book builds on some fairly simple - but enormously powerful - tools including basic financial modeling and queuing theory. Reinertsen explains why the tools are relevant and how to employ them across a spectrum of businesses. He then uses the tools to substantiate some remarkable product development concepts that he presents later in the book. The book is - thankfully - devoid of pithy phrases and buzz words. It teaches methods and ways of thinking. It doesn't profess answers, but it has driven an enormous amount of our product planning and product development efforts. I haven't found a better book on the subject.
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Summary: Best book on product development and agility around
Review: I don't think they use the word agility once, but this book clearly enunciates all of the reasons that agile processes often show success, without prescribing a specific set of items to do. This book will enable managers of development teams to look at the product they're building, its impact on the business's bottom line, and make both long-term and daily decisions about how to run their team. Individual developers will also gain an understanding of how to better streamline processes -- for instance, people often think that introducing large processes to "prevent an error from happening again" is a good idea. However, this book will help you to learn why that can be bad; that it can introduce queues and actually result in a process slowdown, especially if it happens early in the development process and on the critical path. I just can't say enough about this book; some other specific books on Agile software development are helpful to give you ideas of specific things to do, but this book is absolutely crucial to learn and use in your daily decision-making process.
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Summary: World-class information for product development managers
Review: I have never seen so much good advice about product development in one place. Applying concepts from manufacturing, finance, queuing theory and communications theory, Reinertsen proposes many ways in which we can design better processes for development. For example, if we were to view the investment in design work as a depreciating asset, like work-in-process inventory in the factory, we would be able to make better decisions about time, manpower, and project delay tradeoffs. Key concepts include: valuing design work based on its financial impact on the organization; learning as much as possible as early as possible in the development cycle; managing queues in the development process; creating specifications which are flexible for as long as possible, so that evolving customer requirements can be accommodated. He clearly shows that we can optimize development work on only one of the following parameters: Product cost, product performance, speed of development, development expense. The approach for each one is different, and it is important to be clear which one is primary. There is a wealth of useful and practical advice in this book. For example, here are some comments on testing: "Too often testing is viewed as a necessary evil in the development process. It only exists because we make mistakes. If we made fewer mistakes, we would not need to do all this testing. We should spend our money on `designing in quality' instead of finding defects by testing. The result of such an attitude may be a test department that is under-resourced and under-managed. Unfortunately, by viewing testing as a problem, rather than an asset, we miss the opportunity to capitalize on the extraordinary improvements that can take place in product testing.
"Let us start by putting testing in perspective. The elapsed schedule time for product testing is typically 30 to 60 percent of overall development cycle length. This is not another minor activity, it is a major design activity. ... text results have inherently high information content. In fact, testing is usually the stage of design process that generates the greatest amount of information.... ...Most companies misunderstand the role of testing ... because they fail to distinguish between design testing and manufacturing testing. ... Manufacturing testing is done to identify defects in the manufacturing process. ... Design testing is done to generate information about the design. A good outcome is high information generation early in the design process. ... We want a failure rate close to 50 percent...." [pp 230-232] I highly recommend this book to senior managers in product development, and their Marketing and Finance counterparts. Reviewed by John Levy,
...
Rating:
Summary: World-class information for product development managers
Review: I have never seen so much good advice about product development in one place. Applying concepts from manufacturing, finance, queuing theory and communications theory, Reinertsen proposes many ways in which we can design better processes for development. For example, if we were to view the investment in design work as a depreciating asset, like work-in-process inventory in the factory, we would be able to make better decisions about time, manpower, and project delay tradeoffs. Key concepts include: valuing design work based on its financial impact on the organization; learning as much as possible as early as possible in the development cycle; managing queues in the development process; creating specifications which are flexible for as long as possible, so that evolving customer requirements can be accommodated. He clearly shows that we can optimize development work on only one of the following parameters: Product cost, product performance, speed of development, development expense. The approach for each one is different, and it is important to be clear which one is primary. There is a wealth of useful and practical advice in this book. For example, here are some comments on testing: "Too often testing is viewed as a necessary evil in the development process. It only exists because we make mistakes. If we made fewer mistakes, we would not need to do all this testing. We should spend our money on 'designing in quality' instead of finding defects by testing. The result of such an attitude may be a test department that is under-resourced and under-managed. Unfortunately, by viewing testing as a problem, rather than an asset, we miss the opportunity to capitalize on the extraordinary improvements that can take place in product testing.
"Let us start by putting testing in perspective. The elapsed schedule time for product testing is typically 30 to 60 percent of overall development cycle length. This is not another minor activity, it is a major design activity. ... text results have inherently high information content. In fact, testing is usually the stage of design process that generates the greatest amount of information.... ...Most companies misunderstand the role of testing ... because they fail to distinguish between design testing and manufacturing testing. ... Manufacturing testing is done to identify defects in the manufacturing process. ... Design testing is done to generate information about the design. A good outcome is high information generation early in the design process. ... We want a failure rate close to 50 percent...." [pp 230-232] I highly recommend this book to senior managers in product development, and their Marketing and Finance counterparts. Reviewed by John Levy,
...
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Summary: Real thinking and action tools you can use
Review: If you're looking for a book to arm you with the latest buzzwords and easy answers, this is not for you. If you're looking for a useful framework for thinking about product design and tools for applying principles, this is an excellent buy. This book is clearly written, well-organized, and full of useful information. Unlike many management books, it's not 20 pages of information stretched out to 200 pages in order to make a book. Also, unlike most product development books, this book is of great value not just to product managers and designers, but would be a great read for financial managers and marketing managers. A manufacturing manager reading this book will smile with satisfaction at seeing common modern manufacturing principles well applied to the design realm. The only weak points I can think of are: 1) That it may be useful for the author to break out case studies rather than keeping them in the same typeface intermingled with the rest of the text. 2) No real advice is given on how to overcome real-world resistance to these ideas. Some sage advice on how to introduce these concepts and tools into organizations with existing biases and cultures could be a real benefit to practitioners. These are minor objections though. Whether you're in a software start-up or part of a Fortune 500 company design team doing existing product improvement, this book contains useful information that will enhance your understanding of what you're doing right and what you could do better - and WHY!
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