Alexander Bird Software • Blog

Reading List

Books I've found helpful or want to read soon

Before you get into it: I've sorted these to make them easier to browse, but I'm not totally satisfied with the categories — they don't do the books justice. So, take the headings with a grain of salt.

Software Structure

Books about how to structure your software

Building Evolutionary Architectures

Ford, Parsons, & Kua

How to build software that maintains its virtues as it grows and changes

Book

Domain-Driven Design

Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

Evans

How to architect software to make that solves real problems and can be adapted easily to solve new problems (by making it easy to collaborate with non-technical domain experts).

Book

Refactoring

Improving the Design of Existing Code

Fowler

Detailed instructions and examples about how to change code without breaking it.

Book

Design Patterns

Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides

An inventory of ways to structure your code to solve certain technical problems (including examples and notes on when to prefer one over the other)

Book

Process & People

Books about software development process and how we collaborate

Software Design X-Rays

Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis

Tornhill

Uncovering coupling, pain-points, technical debt, who has what expertise, team boundaries, and many other useful things using your git repository, git commands, and bash.

Book

Lean Thinking

Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

Womack & Jones

How to focus on the useful things and remove the useless things so you can deliver more value more effectively. Many case studies.

Book

Rework

Fried & Hansson

Advice about professional attitudes and values that lead to healthy and effective software development

Book

The Practice of Creativity

A Manual for Dynamic Group Problem-Solving

Prince

How to run a really effective brainstorming session

Book

Design & Planning

Books about how we decide what software to build

User Story Mapping

Discover the whole story, build the right product

Patton

An approach to eliciting, organizing, and collaborating on the details of what the software should do without losing sight of the big picture. So much better than a flat backlog in Jira.

Book

No Estimates

How to measure project progress without estimating

Duarte

Estimates help us plan because they help us answer several important questions. This book presents an alternative method that is more effective and less effort than traditional estimates.

Book Blog