I received my copy of the Dynamics of Software Development 2006 Edition by Jim McCarthy yesterday and I'm thoroughly impressed. The book comes with a video of the presentation he used to do on his "23 rules of thumb for shipping great software ontime". The video is worth the price of the book alone. It's both entertaining and extremely relevant even 11+ years later.
There are several updates to his pre-existing rules that offer better insight. One excellent example is his "Don't go dark" rule - in this edition he adds that going dark is any code that is not checked in for more than 3 weeks. This and many other points are refinements from the original book.
Many of his rules predate the notions in Agile development by many years - just a few examples...
- Get the product to a shippable state and keep it there.
- QA is responsible for articulating the quality and status of the product at any given point in time
- Become great at integration - don't put off deployment testing until the end of the cycle.
There is new content in the book as well, especially the portion added at the end focused on building a good team environment. I haven't had a chance to digest this portion yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
Bottom line - if you don't own this book and you have ANYTHING to do with software development, buy it. I blogged about a 2nd Edition of this book that surfaced for a short period last summer on Amazon as a pre-order, but it just as quietly disappeared. I'm glad McCarthy got it into print. If you own the original book, buy the second book. Just the video itself is worth the price of the book.