Book Review: Ship It!

Ship It!, $29.95
by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney, Jr.
Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005
198 pages
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/prj/index.html

The authors of this one are a pair of experienced developers and managers at SAS. What they've done here is pull together a range of tools and techniques that they've found work to help get products out the door. They've divided these into three areas: Techniques (such as daily meetings, code reviews), Infrastructure (such as version control and scripted builds), and Process (a simple iterative methodology). All of this gets tied together with lots of stories of the form "at one organization we saw X and gosh was it bad until we had them do Y instead." The authors shy away from promoting any particular methodology, whether agile or structured, and instead focus on instituting just a few core changes that can make a difference however you organize your shop.

It's not like there's any major shortage of books preaching this sort of discipline of software development out there. Indeed, Pragmatic Bookshelf was founded from the impetus of the excellent THE PRAGMATIC PROGRAMMER, which contains a lot of this stuff. You'll also find similar sentiments in books such as PEOPLEWARE, DYNAMICS OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, EXTREME PROGRAMMING EXPLAINED, CODE COMPLETE, PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, and my own CODER TO DEVELOPER - and I could add a dozen more titles just by going over my own bookshelves. The authors do bring their own style to the table, of course, and their own set of war stories. Their emphasis on continuous integration and scripted builds is stronger than in some of the other titles in the genre, and their section of tips on what to do when things aren't going right (based on decades of experience) is especially helpful.

But ultimately, I have to say that I didn't learn anything new here. Those of us who have been paying attention already know about these particular ways to turn a chaotic development mess into a smooth software delivery process. It's s sad fact, though, that (as the authors point out) something like 70% of the development shops out there just flat out ignore this stuff, even though it's not rocket science. If you're in one of those shops, just hacking on code from dawn till midnight with no source code control or issue tracking or plan of action, with pissed-off customers and a product that barely works (on the days when it builds at all), then for heaven's sake do something. Quit your job and go somewhere where they actually develop software instead of just writing code, or buy your manager this book, or buy him my book, but stop being a part of the problem. It would be really nice if, as an industry, we could stop being such a bunch of screwed-up clowns and start living up to our potential. Ship It! is one of the things that could help, if only those who need the advice in its covers would pay attention.