Beyond Chaos:
The Expert Edge in Managing Software Development

by Larry Constantine (editor)

Beyond Chaos: The Expert Edge in Managing Software Development is a collection of papers edited by my friend and colleague, Larry Constantine. It's a collection of 45 papers, taken from various papers published in the "Management Forum" section of Software Development magazine, of which Larry is the editor. In addition to several articles by Larry himself, you'll find contributions by Karl Wiegers, Rob Thomsett, Capers Jones, Steve McConnell, Jim Highsmith, Meilir Page-Jones, Tony Wasserman, and some guy named Yourdon — as well as a number of other consultants and practitioners whose names may not be quite as familiar to you, but whose insights and perspectives are well worth reading. The papers are organized into half a dozen sections, covering peopleware, basic issues of project management, high-pressure projects, software quality, processes and practices, and leadership/teamwork.

If you keep up with the professional literature in the software development field, then you probably subscribe to Software Development already; and you may have seen some of the individual papers in Beyond Chaos when they were first published. But I have to admit that at least half of the papers in Larry's collection were new to me; and even if you are one of the few who actually did really read all of the articles, chances are you've misplaced them by now. Beyond Chaos brings them all together, and I'm delighted to place this book on my bookshelf, alongside several others that Larry has produced over the years.