The Dark Side of Software Engineering: Evil on Computing Projects

Betrayal! Corruption! Software Engineering?

This is not a book about software project failure, or about prescriptive thinking about how to build software better. This is a book about the evil things that happen on computing and software projects—what the kinds of evil are, how they manifest themselves, and what the good guys can do about them.

In this timely report on vice at every level of software project management, industry experts Johann Rost and Robert Glass explore the seamy underbelly of software engineering. Based on the authors' original research and augmented by frank insights from other well-respected figures, The Dark Side of Software Engineering consists of anecdotes about occurrences of the practices, an analysis of research findings in the context of the anecdotes, and some suggestions on what to do about the dark side. Discussions draw from the software and information technology literature and from the management literature specific to these topics.

This is a book full of surprises—to be read by both software and computing practitioners and academics. It addresses seven "dark side matters" of software project work that involve dubious management and technologist practices, including:

Subversion

Espionage

Lying

Disgruntled employees and sabotage

Hacking

Whistleblowing

Theft of information

Written in a quick-reading journalistic style, The Dark Side of Software Engineering goes where other management studies fear to tread—a corporate environment where schedules are fabricated, trust is betrayed, millions of dollars are lost, and there is a serious need for the kind of corrective action that this book ultimately proposes.