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After leaving my last "regular job" where I had worked as their Manager of Quality Engineering, I decided to attempt to capture the lessons I had learned about software development and software quality in a book. The overwhelming impression I had gotten from working in various software development roles was that the way in which all of the commercial software development organizations I had worked with had committed the same error over and over again. This could be summed up in the observation that, "...there's never time to do it right but there's always time to do it over."

The problem with waiting for a do over to get it right is that the customer gets a broken product until the do over release. Worse, the do over release ends up on the same sort of impossible schedule as the previous release and ends up as the same sort of stinking pile of bug infested garbage as the previous release. This cycle continues until the company fails as customers find an alternative product that isn't quite as bad (at least the alternative product's salesperson will claim that).

From the developer's perspective, the repetitive, bug infested releases that result from this abomination of a software development "methodology" are absolutely predictable. The problem is that no one who controls the development process is willing or able to stop the cycle. This repetition of a futile task led me to title my book A New Chore for Sisyphus. Since I was unable to find a traditional (treeware) publisher, I have decided to publish the book myself on-line.

The book will be appearing under the right menu navigation area as "The Book". Since this is my first experience using Drupal to publish a book, expect a few glitches along the way. I will also create a discussion thread under the Computer and Linux topic for any comments, suggestions or other discussion regarding my book.

Cheers,
Dave