Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Scott Rosenberg · ★★★★☆ · 416 pages · 2007
One of the things the author gets into is that Kappor's employees did not have the following:
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a sense of urgency. A lot of the employees came from Netscape where they were trying to push hard to build the product because of Microsoft, competition and a lack of money.
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did not have a base codebase which they could iterate over. They were trying to find the perfect solution without settling on a MVP and iterating on it.
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There was also a pitfall in that they were trying to build with the assumption that since the project was open source that people will come in hoards to help build it but that didn't happen.
In the end the author goes over what seemed like a typical software project and how it took so long to find a process to follow. In the end the moral of the book is software is hard, likely one of the hardest of human endeavors and because of that there has not been a solid process which can be attributed to being the correct way of doing software.