TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

The Golden Age of Software

Eric Lundquist | Date: 04-26-10 | Comments

Two books, �Making it Big in Software� and �Reflections on Management,� can help you and your company build software that matters.

This should be the golden era of software. The big impediments in the past to creating and selling software applications are gone. You no longer have to wait until you build a great big hardware infrastructure for your software (you can now rent it from Amazon), you don�t have to guess what platform to write for (aim for the Web, it is a big target), and the rise of the mobile Internet means your applications have lots of room to run.

So what�s stopping you? I�m guessing that you are stopped because, like many companies and executives, you don�t have a guide through the software maze, and you�re having trouble focusing on where to start and which application to develop.

I�ve recently received two books that can help you out of your software dilemma. �Making it Big in Software� and �Reflections on Management� would be worth the weekend it takes to work your way through the books before undertaking that world-changing software project.

�Making it Big in Software� (from Prentice Hall, and with its own Website at MakingItBigCareers.com) is written by longtime IBM software guru Sam Lightstone. Near as I can tell, it contains everything this senior exec knows about brewing software from a technology, business and management perspective. What makes the book particularly attractive was Sam�s willingness to go out and interview other software stars, including Google�s Marissa Mayer, Java inventor James Gosling and Apple founder Steve Wozniak. The interviews alone are worth the price of admission.

What is in the book beyond those interviews? Answers to questions about how to develop as a software exec beyond being a code pounder, how the business of software works, and�maybe most important of all�how to get compensated for all those late nights of drinking soda and eating cold pizza.

An appropriate accompaniment for Lightstone's book is Watts Humphrey�s �Reflections on Management,� with a subtitle of "How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss and Yourself" (Addison-Wesley). Humphrey is a senior fellow at the Software Engineering Institute and also was a software manager at IBM for 27 years. He brings a lot of discipline and insight into software development strategies.

Software development projects, especially at bigger companies, have a bad habit of growing out of control and over budget�and producing an end result that often looks nothing like the original conception. It doesn�t have to be that way, and these two books can help you and your company build software that matters.