I recently read Waltzing With Bears by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, these are the same guys who wrote Peopleware so I was curious to give it a read as I found Peopleware useful, if a little dry.

Waltzing with Bears is all about managing software risk. Specifically the risk that something will not be delivered on time. The example the pair give early in the book is an airport which couldn’t open because the software to operate the baggage carousel wasn’t working. A late software delivery had huge financial impact.

In the book the authors talk about different ways to identify, represent, and manage risk. Like their other book Peopleware Waltzing with Bears is very comprehensive walk through of software risk covering a lot of the basics as well as some really interesting topics such as how to show delivery dates in a graph format to show the earliest possible, most likely, and worst case delivery dates. Thereby giving far more context than a best guess (which as we all know has a bad habit of being communicated to clients and becoming a deadline).

The authors made a very nice point about the bold being the ones who start projects early, not the ones who set ambitious deadlines and expect people to hit them.

However, I couldn’t help feeling like the authors were missing a big piece. The entire book (which I admit isn’t a long one) is based around delivery date risk. There’s no mention of many of the other risks which software teams face including usability, tech debt, and the ever present security risks. I would have liked to have seen more (well, any) pages dedicated to risks which aren’t about the due date. I felt like we were given a comprehensive introduction, but at the expnense of a breadth of knowledge of how to manage other risks.

Overall a good book which is well worth a read to anyone getting started in project planning and wants to understand how to manage the risk deliveries will run late. However, only a 4* read for me.

What do you think? Have you read Waltzing with Bears? Post your comments below!