I’ll be honest: I wanted to like “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” by Robert L. Glass more than I did. I’m not sure if it’s dated badly — it’s from 2002 — or I was in the wrong frame of mind, or something else, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is structured as a list of facts grouped around areas such as “Management” and “Requirements.” For each fact, there is a discussion, the controversy, and then the sources and references. The writing aims to be friendly, but I found it a bit grating¹.

Going back through the fifty-five facts and fallacies, I find that I agree with the majority of them². Twenty years on from the original version, I suspect that some are less controversial than when it was originally published. There is some degree of (justified) scepticism about the newfangled “agile” process, which is now largely standard across the industry. Yet it’s also reassuring how little other things have changed. There is still little transfer between academia and industry. Quality continues to be a hot-button topic. And software maintenance rarely gets the love it deserves.

I’ve seen this book described as a classic, so maybe I’m missing something. There are many books I would suggest you read first. In the end, I didn’t like the writing, and I think that there are too few original insights in too many words.