I Guess

 

I really enjoyed providing pre-production comments on Rich Rogers' book on quality, Changing Times,  so when the opportunity to do the same for George Dinwiddie came up recently, I took it.

Why? Oh, a handful of reasons, including:

• I'm here for the testing and reviewing feels a lot like testing. (My definition of testing: the pursuit of relevant incongruity.)
• There's the interesting intellectual challenge of finding a way to provide the kind of review being requested effectively and efficiently.
• There's the interesting social challenge of delivering my thoughts in a way that conveys them respectfully, despite sometimes being critical.

George's book is called Software Estimation Without Guessing and I knew up front that there would be two rounds of review for it. The first was on a version with a couple of chapters still to be written, the second with all content present but further editing still required.

The publisher, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, provided clear guidelines on the kind of review they wanted and, in particular, they asked for grammar and typos to be excluded. Initially I felt that this might be a mistake — I could see them, why not point them out and reduce the chance they'd be missed later — but increasingly came to think that it was a good call. By ignoring them, I didn't break my flow to annotate stuff that is probably bread and butter to professional editors, instead delivering what value I could by commenting on the content based on my domain knowledge.

Pragmatic also provided a list of questions, which I decided to treat as an aid to reflection, and so this is how I approached the initial tranche of feedback:

• I read from the beginning to the end without skipping forwards at all.
• Along the way, I annotated the manuscript directly with suggestions, criticisms, and things I was wondering about. I hoped that understanding a reader's expectation at different points might be interesting to George in terms of structuring.
• I didn't read in blocks of less than a chapter.
• After each chapter, I re-read Pragmatic's questions and, in a separate text file, added fieldstones for each of them, and also for an "Other" category. These comments tended to be at a higher level than those made directly into the draft.
• When I had read all of the material, I sorted and edited down my answers to the questions.
• Finally, I reviewed my comments on the manuscript. To make it clear which comments were my first reactions and which had been made with the benefit of hindsight, I flagged this later round with "(2)".

Using Pragmatic's questions to structure my big-picture thoughts was useful even though talking to the editor later I found that they're a reasonably standard set. I treated them essentially as a checklist:

• Who is the audience for this book? Is the book’s tone appropriate for that audience?
• Is the book well-organized? Is the material presented in a reasonable order, and does it flow well from one topic to the next? Does the table of contents provide a useful guide?
• Is the book correct? Are there any technical details that are in error, misleading, or perhaps recently superseded?
• Is the book engaging? Do you want to keep reading it?
• Is the book complete? Are there any missing topics, or extraneous topics that should not have been included?
• Is the book consistent? Is the level of detail consistent and appropriate? How about the audience being addressed?
• Would you recommend this book to others? Why or why not?

The second round manuscript provided the material that was absent in the first draft, but didn't change the other content. Again, I thought about how to approach it to compromise reasonably between the time I could put in, the coverage I was being asked to provide, and the depth I could go to. This is what I did:

• I read through only the new chapters, annotating as I went.
• Again, I read in chapter-length blocks.
• I read through my answers to the publisher questions from last time.
• Where it seemed appropriate, I provided new answers in which I was prepared to emphasise, downgrade, add, or remove my originals.
• I reviewed my comments on the new material looking for inconsistencies between it and earlier comments.

Retrospecting on my methodology, I notice how natural I find this kind of cycle: dive in, record findings and feelings, reflect, choose a level of review and go again. I see it in my day job too. The publisher checklist gave me a structure in this case, but where I don't have one I'll usually distil it from the notes I've recorded.

The human element feels crucial to tasks like this. Beyond some Twitter chat, reading his blog, and watching a recent webinar I don't know George. However I've been on the receiving end of many reviews and know well my sense of indignation and self-righteous rightness when confronted with some thoughtful analysis that contradicts a line I've taken. (This is only amplified when changing my line would involve a lot of work.)

I try to bear this in mind when providing requested feedback, but it can sometimes be hard to balance humility and candour. When in doubt, for this task, I've tried to err on the side of my truth, hoping that'll be more useful to hear, even if it's dismissed.

And that prompts one final thought; although I doubt that he ever had any other intention, I found myself feeling the need to say this to George about my comments: "Ignore anything you want. It's your book!" That's not to belittle my effort, but to reflect the mindset with which I tried to approached the review. It's only my opinion and mentally tagging what I've said with "I guess" can help to remember that, as it's read but also as it's written.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/bTQwf4