Book Review Peopleware: Productive project and teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

How do I know about it: Joel Spolsky gave the booka glowing recommendation on his blog. Being a fan of Joel, I bought a copy.

Content:
The book is divided into five parts. Part 1: Managing the human resources, there are six chapters. Chapter 1: Somewhere today, a project is failing. Chapter 2: Make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger. Chapter 3: Vienna waits for you. Chapter 4: Quality-If time permits. Chapter 5: Parkison's law revisited. Chapter 6: laetrile. Part 2: The office environment has seven chapters and one intermezzo. Chapter 7: The furniture police. Chapter 8: "You never get anything done around here". Chapter 9: Saving money on space. Intermezzo(according to the book,"an intermezzo is a fanciful digression inserted between the pages of an otherwise serious work"): Productivity measurement and unidentified flying objects. Chapter 10: Brain time versus body time. Chapter 11: The telephone. Chapter 12: Bring back the door. Chapter 13: Taking umbrella steps. Part 3: The right people has four chapters. Chapter 14: The hornblower factor. Chapter 15: Hiring a juggler. Chapter 16: Happy to be here. Chapter 17: The self-healing system. Part 4: Growing productive teams has six chapters, chapter 18: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Chapter 19: The black team. Chapter 20: Teamicide. Chapter 21: A spaghetti dinner. Chapter 22: Open kimono. Chapter 23: Chemistry for team formation. Part 5: It is supposed to be fun to work here has three chapters, chapter 24: Chaos and order. Chapter 25: Free electrons, chapter 26: Holgar Dansk.

What I like: It is a small book, with total of 188 pages and twenty six chapters. That puts average of 7 pages per chapter. The longest chapter is 12 pages and shortest one is 3. With short chapter, it is easier on readers concentration span. On the other hand, it puts high demands on author to deliver points efficiently. Overall, this book delivers. I feel I take home a clear message from each chapter. In terms of content, the book brought back a lot of dreaded memory of my previous project experience and shed a light on them. One now-defunct start-up I worked for before, the CTO went through a product design meeting with us engineers and wrote down the time needed on the whiteboard, then set a deadline that reduced the development time by one fifth. Guess what, the product was delivered overdue with a lot of bugs in them, and the whole engineering team had to be brought to the support side to fix the problem (at meantime making more bugs along the way). And years after the company imploded, I found the answer in the book.

What I dislike: None.

Quotables: "Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity." "Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it." "The one thing that all the best organization shares is a preoccupation with being the best." And I especially like the authors quoting of "Vienna waits for you" by Billy Joel, oh, those good old days J