The Management. Such an interesting topic for a book dedicated to becoming a professional. What Uncle Bob is talking about here is two distinct forms of management; personal management and business management. Interestingly enough, these two topics become intertwined quite often. The first instance in which this appears in the book is when he talks about meetings. When the section starts on meetings Uncle Bob stated something I’ve been saying for years now.

There are two truths about meeting.
1. Meetings are necessary.
2. Meetings are huge time wasters.

My current position requires me to attend an occasional meeting, typically conference call style. The one thing I have found is that these meetings are very important to keep people up to date on whatever the contents of the meeting are and it helps get every one on the same page. However, every meeting I have been apart of was by no means short. I believe the shortest meeting I was ever apart of still lasted 45 minutes and by the end I walked out with no more knowledge then I had gone in with. Having had these experiences, when I saw Uncle Bob’s statement about the two truths of meetings I felt relieved that I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. Uncle Bob went on to talk about the different meetings that are had in a Scrum methodology of software development. Reading his thoughts on how these scrum meetings should go is very interesting. Currently with the Capstone class at WSU we are using Scrum and I can see how some of these meetings could go very long. I believe my team and I have done a good job and avoiding wasted time during these meetings, though.

The rest of chapter 9 covers ways to stay focused. Fortunately for me, most of these methodologies or theories appear to be common sense to me and I didn’t take away that much new information from these paragraphs.

Chapter 10 talks about estimates. Interestingly enough, I’ve had to create a few estimates in my line of work. Granted these were extremely small scale and usually completed in under an hour. The thing I learned from creating those estimates was, it’s incredibly hard to estimate time for when things go wrong.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post I listened to a podcast (You can find it here ) on software estimation a few months back. This chapter from Uncle Bob felt like a refresher on the things talked about in the podcast. What I find most fascinating about this subject, is that in my field an estimate is occasionally taken as “set-in-stone” and “done-deal” type of artifacts. However, that’s what business has turned it into and that was never what estimates were intended to be used for.

I don’t have too much more to say about estimates for software, seeing as I haven’t had to ever create one yet. However, I know when my time comes to finally use this information, I will be referring back to Uncle Bob!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom by CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.