The Deadline : A Novel About Project Management
by Tom DeMarco
"His most recent work is The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management, published in the summer of 1997 by Dorset House. It is the story of a veteran software manager who bets his life on a delivery date. How does he manage the project with the stakes so high? Read the book and find out." says his publisher.
Tom always was clever and The Deadline is a clever book. Though he might not like to see it used that way, it is an inspired template for any training manual. Tom and I were friends and house mates in college at Cornell. I never understood nor cared much about his passion - something about how to productively organize the people who manage software projects, I think. He's pretty famous for his earlier books: PEOPLEWARE: Productive Projects and Teams; Structured Analysis and System Specification, 1979; Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation, 1982; and WHY DOES SOFTWARE COST SO MUCH? And Other Puzzles of the Information Age, 1995. Anyway, I never read these tomes, although, in fairness, my friend Ron Diener took the copy of Structured Analysis and System Specification Tom had given me before I had a chance to read it. Ron used it to organize library computer systems in Ohio and Spain. Nevertheless, "The Deadline" is delightful reading even though you can tell it's just a painless way of presenting his serious work. - Jim Buckley
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