We’re very eager to announce that Software Change Management: Case Studies and Practical Advice (9780735664753, Page count 192), by Donald J. Reifer, has shipped to the printer.
Why is it so difficult to change organizations? What does it really take to make “process improvement” yield measurable results? For more than 30 years, Donald Reifer has been guiding software teams through the technical, organizational, and people issues that must be managed in order to make meaningful process changes—and better products. This practical guide draws from his extensive experience, featuring 10 prototype case studies spanning the public and private sectors and even academia. Each case study illuminates the original conditions; describes options and recommendations; details reactions, outcomes, and lessons learned; and provides essential references and resources.
CHAPTER 1 Getting Started CHAPTER 2 Industrial Case: Organizational Change in a Large Information Technology Shop CHAPTER 3 Industrial Case: Justifying a Process Improvement Program for a Large Bank CHAPTER 4 Industrial Case: Moving to Commercial Off-the-Shelf and Open-Source Software Usage in Telecommunications CHAPTER 5 Industrial Case: Small Defense Project Needs Help CHAPTER 6 Industrial Case: Utility Moving to the Clouds CHAPTER 7 Industrial Case: Adoption of Agile Methods CHAPTER 8 Government Case: Large Defense Project Behind Schedule and Over Budget CHAPTER 9 Government Case: Introducing New Technology CHAPTER 10 Government Case: Maintenance Shop in Turmoil CHAPTER 11 Academic Case: Establishing a Meaningful Collaboration with Industry CHAPTER 12 Making an Impact
This book presents ten case studies that revolve around how to manage change in industrial, governmental, and academic settings. Each case was selected to communicate lessons learned that the reader can use to address typical issues that occur during the process of change. Context-sensitive knowledge about how others managed change within these settings is communicated by describing what others did when faced with adversity.
This book was written to equip those making and managing changes in software organizations with the processes, techniques, and tools that they need to be successful. If you are involved in change initiatives, this book is for you because it points out what the typical issues are that you will face and how others in similar situations have dealt with them.
This book is targeted for consumption by a broad range of readers, from executives to those software engineers who want to pursue change initiatives aimed at getting the job of software development and maintenance done quicker, smarter, and better. Professors will also fi nd this text helpful in communicating the fundamentals associated with instituting and managing change in organizations. Entrepreneurs and business people might want to take advantage of concepts included within the case studies that describe how to facilitate making the changes necessary to transition products to market quicker. Researchers might fi nd the text useful in structuring how they package their new research developments for eventual commercialization.
This book expects that you have at least a basic understanding of underlying software engineering and management fundamentals that set the context for the changes described within the case studies. If you need refresher materials in these topics, you might consider reading Steve McConnell’s Code Complete, Second Edition, (Microsoft Press, 2004), Roger Pressman’s Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, Seventh, Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2009), and Donald Reifer’s Software Management, Seventh Edition (Wiley IEEE Computer Society, 2006).
While this book might be interesting reading for entry-level software engineers, such readers need to be warned that the book presents only the background information needed to understand the management structure, industrial practices, implementation issues, and underlying technology for each of the case studies covered. Because the knowledge needed to fully understand the issues more deeply can take years to learn for the uninitiated, these readers and others from non-software backgrounds are warned that some of the discussions on how to resolve problems may be beyond their capacity to fully understand.
This book is organized around ten case studies. Chapter 1, “Getting Started,” presents some background and context materials for these cases, while Chapter 12, “Making an Impact,” provides a summary of lessons learned. The other ten chapters focus on learning experiences presented as case studies that range from making needed organizational changes in a large Information Technology (IT) shop to addressing adoption of Agile methods in a smaller, high technology organization. While based on real-world experiences, all of the cases represent fi ctitious examples developed to highlight different change management messages. Each of these ten cases is trying to communicate that change is hard and no matter what you do to facilitate the transition to something new, people will resist it. In response, each case tries to highlight the change management principles you can use to make the change and get the job done, often over the objections of others who are more comfortable with the status quo.
For those using this text in software engineering courses, I have authored an Instructor’s Manual. The purpose of the manual is to help the instructor organize discussions for each of the ten case studies presented in a systematic manner. The manual might also assist others reading the book to determine all of the messages that the cases are trying to communicate. It was fun to write and should be fun to read.
Software management changes is one of the biggest challenges for software engineers: this book could be very useful.