29 November 2006 - 16:29A short-coming of tech books

I’ve been reading a few tech books lately and all of them are concerned with OO concepts, how to apply various solutions to various problems, how to create an agile/loosely-coupled/flexible/etc… architecture, how to interact with domain experts, etc…
What is sorely missing is literature on how to deal with a software product which has already been built. All the above issues are to be used when starting with a clean slate, something that doesn’t happen all the time. Starting with a clean slate is the best that a software developer can hope for, more often than not the developer will get parachuted in a no man’s land of duplicate code, outdated documentation, conflicting requirements, etc…
I understand that putting together a ‘perfect project’ is crucial to avoiding trouble down the road, but I find the current tech books to be a bit disingenious in the sense that they start from the best development scenario, that is they start before one line of code has been written.

I think someone should write a ‘Software Development: stories from the trenches’ book, it is badly needed. I would buy one.