One of the other architects at work was running a reading group for our North American comrades, and I felt left out so I figured I may as well just pick up the book to see what the deal was. This book is a bit old, and was written at the time to try and be funny, but to be honest I don’t think the humour has aged well and it makes the book jarring to read. Overall I’d describe the book as having been written in the style of a long form chatty blog post, which is a bit unusual.
90% of the readers of this book will be looking for advice on how to debug software systems, but the book frequently uses hardwaare systems as examples. That speaks to the author’s background, but its not super helpful for modern audiences living in a software defined world.
The book is also a bit dated in terms of terminology and expectations of the work environment — for example, the discussion of repeatable testing doesn’t mention automated regression testing at all, and the only mention of automated tests is fleeting at best. Another example is that the author recommends that you read the manual for whatever system you are testing from cover to cover before starting. Really? When was the last time you saw a real world system with a manual? Certainly for modern software systems this is basically unheard of. There might be a user guide, but engineering documentation is a step we seem to always skip these days.
The awkward bit is the nine rules are actually pretty good advice and have stood the test of time. They are:
- Understand the system
- Make it fail (stimulate the failure, but be careful not to simulate it)
- Quit thinking and look (don’t guess at possible causes, go and seek evidence via instrumentation and direct measurement)
- Divide and conquer
- Change one thing at a time
- Keep an audit trail
- Check the plug
- Get a fresh view
- If you didn’t fix it, it ain’t fixed
I think in summary this book would have been a good blog post, but hasn’t aged well as an actual book. Sorry Dave, better luck next time.
Business & Economics
Amacom Books
September 30, 2006
183
Written in a frank but engaging style, this guide provides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any hardware or software bug quickly. It is applicable for any system in any circumstance.