I. M. Wright's Hard Code by Eric Brechner

From Barnes & Noble

Inside Microsoft, Eric Brechner has spent several years prodding development teams towards greater effectiveness and better quality. His columns, which he writes under the name I. M. Wright, have gained a growing following inside and outside Microsoft. Now he's assembled, organized, and annotated those columns -- so you, too, can be provoked and improved.

Brechner has a talent for cutting straight to the point. For example, what should project managers really be managing, above all? The risk to delivery of critical features. Understand that, and much else falls into place.

Brechner outlines what you can really get from "agile" and "lean" practices, without totally gulping the Kool-Aid. You'll find sensible insights on making specs useful; using time between projects; dealing with testers and non-technical folk; and on "being a manager, and yet not evil incarnate." Along the way, Brechner offers plenty of unscripted insight into life within Microsoft. Provocative, indeed. Bill Camarda, from the November 2007 Read Only

From the Publisher

Get an inside look at how one of Microsoft's Engineering Excellence directors drives discussions about coding best practices. The popular column, I. M. Wright's "Hard Code," was written by Eric Brechner's alter-ego to help stimulate discussion among development engineers at Microsoft-a proven-effective idea. Deliberately provocative, ideas have been debated and pondered by thousands within Microsoft and have increasingly drawn attention from others in the industry. With this book, these essays are now available to any developer. They are thematically arranged, each helping to spark the imagination, stimulate discussion, and promote debate about software development tasks and processes. They encourage developers to reexamine coding, testing, and software-development project-management practices-and gain insight into their own processes to help drive excellence in large, distributed business groups.

Key Book Benefits:

• Provides insights into how Microsoft drives excellence in large, distributed, and diverse business groups

• Features a foreword by Mike Zintel, Director of Development at Microsoft

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