Business Patterns for Software Developers by Allan Kelly

by Allan Kelly

Winning business strategies for building companies that build software.Developing software is hard, but, as many developers-turned-entrepreneurs have discovered, not nearly as hard as building and running a software company. Written by a software developer for developers, this book arms you with the knowledge and skills you need to achieve business success. It provides patterns that describe problems software companies typically face and business strategies the most successful ones have developed for overcoming them. Each pattern opens with a vignette based on the author's years of experience as a high-profile consultant to software firms in the UK and abroad. This is followed by a concise statement of the problem, the obstacles to its resolution, a proven solution, guidance on how to construct and implement the solution and likely outcomes. Patterns can be taken individually to address specific problems or linked to form a panoramic picture spanning the company lifestyle.

Genres: Business

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Allan Kelly has held just about every job in the software world, from system admin to development manager by way of programmer and product manager. Today he works helping teams adopt and deepen Agile practices, and writing far too much. He specialises in working with software product companies and aligning products and processes with company strategy.

He is the author of three books: "Xanpan - reflections on agile and software development" (https://leanpub.com/xanpan), "Business Patterns for Software Developers" and “Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile”; the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets (http://www.dialoguesheets.com), a regular conference speaker and frequent contributor to journals.

More about Allan at http://www.allankelly.net and on Twitter as @allankellynet (http://twitter.com/allankellynet).

Reviews

[Torbjörn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sad to give this book an "Ok".

The introductory chapters are superb. Allan's clarity of thought and his prose while covering patterns in general, strategy and other concepts is some of the best I've read. It's a pleasure and shows how much energy passion and understand he has.
Thus far it's an amazing book, and really it's worth reading for those sections alone.

The comes the patterns, the diagrams linking patterns are very well made, things are laid out in a clear manner, explanations are good and consistent.

But I had hoped for more than only baseline stuff. The book does a good job of establishing a starting point, a vocabulary for the most common concepts and shows that patterns do work in this context but I found nothing that gave me that deep "aha" moment of seeing clearly articulated and named something that I previously could not name or put my finger on.

My recommendation: Read the first "half" that's truly amazing and dip into the patterns on an as-needed/curious basis.