Professional Visual Basic Project Management

Professional Visual Basic Project Management, Jake Sturm, ISBN 1861002939 .

This is a book in the WroxPress? ProgrammerToProgrammer? series.

I can't read it. XP has destroyed me. The book uses the "phase" word!

This book tries to present a "cyclic methodology", but it's really the bad kind of Spiral - the kind where you do WaterFall over and over again.

UnitTests are presented on two pages near the end of the book - the BigBangTesting chapter.

If WROX would stick to just re-documenting the APIs then they'd avoid being part of the problem!

-- PCP

If anyone is willing to help WroxPress? improve their project management material by presenting an extreme approach to VB project management (especially if you can include .NET), then contact DevLunsford. Thanks

Please explain to me how XP differs from doing WaterFall over and over again. Or point me to where this is explained succinctly on Wiki. Thanks, -- WaldenMathews

I was not expecting this to be the "XP for VB" book, but...

• CodeUnitTestFirst
• RelentlessTesting
• DoSimpleThings
• OnceAndOnlyOnce
• PairProgramming
• PlanningGame

In summary, WaterFall goes "analyze design code test". Doing things in this order is really hard. XP (inside one EngineeringTask of one UserStory of one iteration) goes "test code design analyze". Analysis gets really easy after we have working, debugged, OnceAndOnlyOnce-compliant code to inspect. Analyzing thin air adds risk.

What does testing thin air add?

("Requirements Analysis", by contrast, is a necessary "first phase", but non-technicals can do it, so it's upstream from PlanningGame.)

VB programmers are actually less likely than the rest of us to have had any exposure whatsoever to the theory and culture of UnitTests. This book gave no examples, and put all testing in the "test phase". That's the part of the schedule most likely to be trimmed by managers as the engineers scramble to recover from the crush of bug reports revealed by BigBangTesting.

Don't go there.

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Why on earth was this labeled on-topic-but-not-needed? Looks to me like a valuable book review with appropriate back links. The book is on topic, but most of the content is not about the book. And only one of the backlinks was really about the book.

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