madklowns reviewed Righting Software by Juval Lowy
Review of 'Righting Software' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
Spoiler: This book is a marketing brochure for the author's $20k course. It's intentionally too vague to be of use, with the premise that the course will fill in the missing parts.
Another book attempting to legitimize "Big Design Up Front" by throwing together some math, design patterns, diagrams, and suggested names. The target audience seems to be non-technical managers and architects who "don't get their hands dirty". The author uses many straw man arguments to explain why this is the One True Way, yet ignores the very real research indicating that 87% of large software projects fail. He provides no legitimate reasons why this method produces designs that won't fall into failure. He attacks Domain Driven Design, which is another Big Design Up Front book that fails to produce results. Frankly, both books are not worth the time, both are entirely subjective, and produce unrepeatable results. The book could …
Spoiler: This book is a marketing brochure for the author's $20k course. It's intentionally too vague to be of use, with the premise that the course will fill in the missing parts.
Another book attempting to legitimize "Big Design Up Front" by throwing together some math, design patterns, diagrams, and suggested names. The target audience seems to be non-technical managers and architects who "don't get their hands dirty". The author uses many straw man arguments to explain why this is the One True Way, yet ignores the very real research indicating that 87% of large software projects fail. He provides no legitimate reasons why this method produces designs that won't fall into failure. He attacks Domain Driven Design, which is another Big Design Up Front book that fails to produce results. Frankly, both books are not worth the time, both are entirely subjective, and produce unrepeatable results. The book could have said, "think of green when designing and it'll all turn out perfectly" and it would be as effective.
However, if you MUST do Big Design Up Front, I would consider the middle sections around estimations and slippage worth a read. I might not apply them directly, but the author has put some good effort thinking through all the little ways projects can deviate from their original estimations. I would read the middle again if faced with such a requirement. However, I strongly think that Big Design Up Front should be extremely rare, so if you're going to attempt such a risky endeavor, the parts about estimations should be one out of a dozen other books you should read
This book is dangerous, and causes immense time wasting as teams bicker and fight over No True Scotsman, or in this case, "No True Righting Software Design" meanwhile turning off their brains to actual critical thinking. "Design Pattern" books like this are very risky and should not be written or consumed.
Edit: having read this book a second time, I'm convinced this is entirely a marketing publication to sell the reader on the $20k training courses sold by the author. It's just vague enough to leave the reader more confused than before, with enough zen-like phrases like "most systems only have 3-5 'managers' and should have fewer 'engines'." It requires the reader to learn a whole new vocabulary (replacing perfectly good words with new ones) which just adds to the confusion. All this confusion is by design, because now the reader wants to know more of these mysteries, and has to drop tens of thousands of dollars to learn more. This is an engineering cult designed to fleece people of their money.