Bill Blogs in C#

Book Review: Mary & Tom Poppendieck

A while back, I read Mary and Tom Poppendieck's "Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash". That tag line, "From Concept to Cash", is the thesis for the book: By minimizing the time between receiving a customer request and delivering value (for cash), a company can obtain a long term competitive advantage.

This book is primarily aimed at management (where the Poppendieck's first book was aimed at the development team). If your biggest challenge is convincing your management to go lean, give them this book. It contains a number of case studies, from the Boeing 777 program to the Polaris missile program to PatientKeeper (a mid-size software development company), to Open Source project. It uses those case studies to justify the claims that lean techniques will bring success. 

Of course, as a developer, you may need to convince management that these techniques will pay off. If that's you, you should read this book. You'll be able to convince management why techniques like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Short Iterations will help the bottom line. That will get traction when a strictly technical argument won't.