I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Kennaley a week ago in Boulder when he attended the Denver PMI conference. I have talked with Mark on several occasions on social media about the SDLC 3.0 book and concepts. And now his Value Stream: Generally Accepted Practice in Enterprise Software Development, which is a continuation of the first book, but focused not just in the development life cycle but the entire enterprise process.
I say all this for a simple reason. Mark's book is unique in that from the first page it resonated with the ideas I hold dear. It is not only well written, it contains powerful ideas that need to be read any anyone in the enterprise IT business. Mark signed the title page with a phrase that reflects my feelings on many modern topics in project management and software development.
This pretty much sums up my World View for those suggesting solutions to complex problems can be had with simple and many time simple minded ideas. Mosty ideas borrowed from quotes about completely different domains, or recycle words like Systems and Systems Engineering into psycho-babble terms that cannot be tested in practice.
I'm going to write a review of Mark's book chapter-by- chapter. I'm on chapter 3. So far it's a breathtaking read. Mandatory for anyone claiming to work in the Enterprise IT world and be accountable for the spend of other peoples money.
I also bought Ron Jeffries book to read on my two week assignment to a client site.
I met Ron at an Agile Development Conference long ago, where I was speaking about agile in government contracting. As well Ron spoke at a local ACM meeting that included many software engineering staff from US West, now Centurylink.
It was interesting to observe the interactions between eXtreme Programming and RBOC software engineers.
I've just started this book, but thought it would be a good read just to see how far the eXtreme Programming paradigm has come. I expect I'll get something out of both books. I'll do the same chapter-by-chapter review here as I'll do for Mark's book.
