Scott Rosenberg has written a book called Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Crown, 2007) and here is an interesting interview with him on What Makes Software So Hard in the CIO Insight Magazine.
The most interesting observations here are that there are not many articles about how ugly making of software is (Scott compares it to Sausage Making!) and how Agile Methods seem to be the most sane way of developing software. Could not agree more! It does not mean that Agile methods are THE final destination in software development methodologies, but definitely seems to be the best one around given current state of the art. Tomorrow it may be something else but as of today, it seems to be the best approach we have!
Which brings me back to my own conviction that we as software engineers try not to acknowledge that the real bottlenecks in software development are communication skills not programming skills! It seems like a vague, gooey issue to contend with and so we gloss over it but seems to be the real killer!
Seems to be a promising book!
