Software Test Engineering with IBM Rational Functional Tester: The Definitive Resource (DeveloperWorks Series) Book

This is a great book on software development process and design.

The agile development definition and practices are easy to digest and are common practice nowadays. I particularly enjoy the programming episode between the author and his colleague. It illustrates how software designs are not great from the beginning, but are refined through an iterative process.

Next, the author presents the agile design principles. These are great principles for software development in general, and not limited to agile software development.

In the next section, a payroll case study is presented. This is the driest part of the book, but necessary to illustrate and consolidate the principles and practices outlined in the previous chapters.

The author also presents quite a few OOP design pattern in details, often comparing 2 similar patterns together. They're good reminders if you've known the patterns before, or good introduction if you haven't. My only complain is that they seem scattered and unstructured. If you're like me, you'd often wonder there's a OOP design pattern chapter right in the middle of the "case study" section with no explanation.

The next section about packaging the payroll system is surprisingly educative. This part makes me think about how to structure software components so that they are most maintainable. Something you do every time you add a new class or a new component.

I didn't finish the whole book. I lost interest after the author throws more OOP design patterns at me without explanations the second time. Maybe I'll come back at a later day. But I'm satisfied with what I've learnt for now.