>>Single Point of Failure >>

• Peopleware ~ Productive Projects and Teams, 2ed 

This book was presented to me as a selection of small essays and articles on team management, but it is so much more than that.
The first thing that becomes clear to the reader is the voice of experience that is expressed in each chapter. Some of the ideas win your over due to their simplicity, they are so obvious that they can’t be contested by anyone. But seeing then written down, black over white, gives then another aura of comprehension.
The authors devote themselves to the issues like the team environment (the physical space that the team needs), team members and their selection and team building.
I really like the metaphor of having a “jell” glue team members, and so increase their productivity. Some introspection really allowed me to relate with the requirements to achieve the “jell formation”, and also identify the issues that make it harder to build a better team.

• Clean Code ~ A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

The quality of you code is obviously something that should never be disregarded, but after reading Clean Code I’ve gained some very good tools (and specially validated arguments) to say “My code still isn’t ready, it needs to be cleaned!”.
The book purposes the idea that you need several iterations to incrementally clean your code. This alone, is not something new, but the author makes a good argument advocating that most of the time that clean up is not done. This leads to severe code rot, and decreased productivity and decreased motivation and…
Apart from showing several techniques to improve/clean your code, it also defends the benefits of Test-Driven Development. On this subject, I need to do some more investigations but it seems that the TDD approach has advantages over the usual “ill-defined” testing that is the normal approach. At least the book opened the “appetite” for the subject…