Book: Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg

Title: Dreaming in Code - Two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software
Author: Scott Rosenberg
ISBN: 978-1-4000-8247-6
URL: www.dreamingincode.com

This book reports how a well-funded, ambitious software project failed. For several years, the author followed the work of a group of developers employed to produce a revolutionary piece of software. The non-profit organisation set up for the task did not have any customers, but was funded by an idealist with deep pockets. Many of the people involved appear to be quite experienced and knowledgeable. The project is called Chandler, and the open source organisation is called OSAF.

The theme of the book is that producing software is complicated and that it is hard to predict whether a project will succeed or fail, and that there is no obvious solution to this problem. The book is aimed at non-programmers. The first 80 or so pages give a background on software development intertwined with the story of the software project. It takes a while for the book to get going. If you are familiar with programming and different programming concepts, you might find some of these pages less interesting. However, the author manages to explain things such as object oriented programming, open source, scripting languages, the halting problem, etc, for a non-programmer and without simplifying too much.

The author appears to be interested in his subject, and understands it well. He is also a good writer. The author does a good job of explaining and exemplifying how hard software development can be. (Still, I cannot keep from thinking, that with a tenth of the funding of the project he describes, my company could do wonders...) But the text is too long, and the problems of the project he is describing are in an exaggerated way generalised into problems of all software development.

This may have been a hard book to write, since I suspect that at the outset, the author figured that he would be describing what should turn out to be a successful project. Instead he had to describe and explain a failure. This is probably why the book to a large extent discusses different software failures. The author has made quite a lot of research, and describes different methodologies for software development meant to reduce the risk and to ensure the quality of software development.

On the whole the book is interesting, but rather pessimistic concerning the state of software development. While perhaps not an inspiring text, you should be able to pick up a few things to stay clear of, though.

With the help of some more editing, maybe the book could have been a little shorter (and better).

A side note: The book discusses the problem of producing reusable code. This is perhaps not the most central theme of the book, but every time I hear about the failure of software producers to create reusable code, I cannot help but to reflect that almost every day, I reuse code. If you program in Java, for instance, there is a huge set of reusable libraries for almost everything: XML processing, GUI building, cryptography, email, sound, sorting, hash tables, databases... the list of components you do not have to implement yourself, but can use as building blocks for new applications, goes on and on. You can even find software for automatically producing code (some machine learning approaches, for instance). There are programming languages and environments that sit on top of other such software: programming languages reusing other programming languages...! (See for example the Scala or JRuby languages.)
From this perspective, there is a breathtaking amount of (freely) available, high quality software about.