What are the best websites to follow for a software engineering manager?

Question

If you only have a small amount of time, what website/blogs/whatever are really helpful to software engineering managers?

Answer 1

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

This guy (who is one of the people who created this site, I believe) runs a small software company and he has all sorts of great insights into the challenges of managing software projects - and more.

Answer 2

www.agilealliance.org -- specifically the articles section

Mike Cohn's Blog

Alistair Cockburn's Blog

JoelOnSoftware

Agile Chronicles

Leading Answers

Note -- since I'm a developer I don't follow all of these, but I did try to pick ones from people I respect.

Answer 3

http://randsinrepose.com/

Although Rands writes randomly about whatever he has in his mind at the moment, whenever he talks about management, it's enlighting.

I also would recommend buying his book Managing Humans to catch up with his writings. It's a compilation of mostly his earlier blog entries, but selected to be an informative journey of the relationship between coders and managers, and the overall life in a software company.

Answer 4

Recently I asked one of my 50 year old software engineering director, "How does he manage to learn some of the future technologies?", and I am noting down his answer.

Step-1: Identify the current technology areas his teams are working Step-2: Identify the relevant website for each of the technology. Example: Embedded systems: www.embedded.com Software engineering : IEEE magazines on Software engineering Step-3: Keep up to date with future trends by reading magazines like IEEE Spectrum Technology news of Google (Filtered for your specific technology area)

He also mentioned it might be difficult to ask someone else when we go higher and higher up the hierarchy, and with less number or no peers, we will have to find things for and by ourselves :)

Answer 5

The Random Manager blog is pretty good also: http://randommanager.blogspot.com/

I find his posts are clear, to-the-point and are free from management jargon and buzzwords.

Answer 6

I like http://duckdown.blogspot.com/ as a starting point. Also click on several of the links in the blogroll. Developing an appreciation for enterprise architecture is a great next step.