Thursday, February 11, 2010

BA Bookshelf

Now obviously the best BA bookshelf is a couple of hundred meg of articles on your USB key, but failing that physical books are nice too. Probably the best bang-for-buck in any training budget can be had by buying a nice collection of books for your team and getting them to read them.

It doesn't matter if they all get lost (they will) the impact of a $50 books is bigger than a $1500 training course, and doesn't require any lost billing-days. So what should you buy?

Get a one good book each on:
  • What requirements are: Karl Eugene Wiegers, Requirements 2nd Ed
  • How to use User Stories: Mike Cohn, User Stories Applied
  • Process Modelling: Bruce Silver, BPMN Method & Style (Haven't actually read it, but everything Mr Silvers says is gold so I have no problem recommending it blind)
  • How to run a good Workshop: EGB, Requirements By Collaboration
  • Use Cases: Alitair Cockburn, Writing Effective Use Cases (What else?)
  • Enterprise Arch: W. Ross, Peter Weill, Enterprise Arch as Strategy

    I suppose you could thrown in something on data modelling as well - but seriously if you have the head for data modelling you're fine, and if you don't a book isn't going to help. Same for UI design. For the record I have a head for data modelling, but I always need help with User Interfaces (Thomas! Mahesh!).

    And this post is not proof-read because I don't have time. I'm going to try and post more often now, which means less quality too.

    Amazon List Here
  • 1 comment:

    1. Great list Harris. I'd heard of Cockburn's book, but I'm not familiar with the rest. Probably something a developer like myself should be well across as well.

      Planning on blogging more over at davidbolton.net too. Remind me if I don't ;)

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