Book about software development for business people?

Question

Sometimes I meet with a prospective client who wants a system built but who is really clueless about how software development works. I was reminded of an old ad for a clothing store whose slogan was "An educated consumer is our best customer".

Does anyone know of a book I could give a prospect like this (who is otherwise quite smart and business savy) which they could read to better understand what the process of building software is all about? The goal would be that once they had read the book they would be better able to interact with programmers and analysts to communicate what they want as expeditiously as possible.

Answer 1

The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks.

Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland.

Answer 2

Rapid Development By Steve McConnell.

Answer 3

• The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
• Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Joel's list of business books with about 75 books:
Reading List: Fog Creek Software Management Training Program

Answer 4

201 Principles of Software Development is pretty good. You can find it on Amazon.

Answer 5

How about Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art: it's not explicitly for business people, but it's a topic that touches them and which you'd find it useful for them to understand.

Answer 6

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by by Eric S. Raymond has some good, non-technical points.

Answer 7

If they are intrigued by what they see and want more details I would recommend Code.

Answer 8

I've got the perfect book for you: Dreaming in Code. It was written by a journalist and co-founder of salon.com (plus Queens, NY native!!) Scott Rosenberg. So it's a nice read for the layman. It demonstrates the difficulties experienced by Mitch Kapor's open source team as they attempt to create a PIM application called Chandler even with a star-studded cast of developers and project managers. So, it will help your clients understand the far from perfect process software engineers have to engage in day in and day out. The narrative also supplies great insight into some great brainstorms can come from in addition to where a delay in shipping can rear its ugly head.

Software developement is very challenging. Engineers have to load a lot of things into their brain's RAM and juggle it throughout a busy day of meetings, code reviews, bug fixes, and finally writing some code! Dreaming in Dreaming in Code provides the a story from an embedded techie journalist's POV from the trenches.

Answer 9

By far, I think The Mythical Man-Month is the best choice; it describes in very business-friendly terms what the problem was, how they attempted to use a business solution for it, and exactly why that was the completely wrong choice. IBM carries a fair amount of weight within the business world, and the fact that it's a case study in how IBM did something is, I think, particularly useful.

Answer 10

Then the book you want (which I am reading now) is "The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad" by Michael A. Cusumano.

Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the world's leading authorities of software companies.

Cusumano based this book on the course on "The Software of Business" that he put together and taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management for many years.

He is the author or coauthor of seven other books, including the bestsellers Microsoft Secrets and Competing on Internet Time (the story of Netscape's downfall).