If you want to know more, there is an excellent book about this subject: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers). I highly recommend it.

but this one is really funny:

There are two equal containers, one of water and one of wine.

You take ladle of wine and put it in the water, later on you take the same ladle of the water-wine mixture and put it into the wine container.

Is there more wine in the water container, or more water in the wine?

A complete answer here: http://www.donaldsauter.com/wine.htm

This shall not be seen as a “must read” or like a “top 20″, there might be some better books that can help you boost your career or some other fundamental readings that I did not list here,
maybe because I already read those books in the past .
Leadership books like “Peopleware”, “Five Disfunctions of a Team”, “7 habits…”, or classic software books like “Code Complete”, “Joel on Software” or in general authors like
Martin Fowler, Mike Cohn, Craig Larman, Tom De Marco are a must read for every professional in our industry.
If you are interested in statistics and stuff like “top 10″ etc, you can have a look on Jurgen Appello’s blog (not all the lists are updated to 2012 but they are still relevant): http://www.noop.nl/lists.html.

Here is a list of  21 books that guided me in 2011:

HIRING & GROWING THE TEAM

1. The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise
2. Growing Software: Proven Strategies for Managing Software Engineers
3. Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
4. The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))
5. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
6. Codermetrics: Analytics for Improving Software Teams
7. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series)
8. Confessions of a Public Speaker (English and English Edition)
9. Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams
10. Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions
11. Algorithms For Interviews

PROCESS IMPLEMENTATION

1. Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
2. 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
3. Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change (Agile Software Development Series)
4. A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development
5. Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic Programmers)

TOOLS

1. Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk
2. Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
3. Agile Documentation: A Pattern Guide to Producing Lightweight Documents for Software Projects (Wiley Software Patterns Series)
4. Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process
5. Agile ALM: Lightweight tools and Agile strategies

It’s that kind of super senior / ex developer that now is doing fancy n types of diagrams (UML, CRC models, DFD, contract model, …),
well in Agile not that many as in a traditional Unified Model like RUP|
but when it’s time to deliver “something” they  fail because they are only diagrammers who don’t write code code at all, or the last time they wrote some code it was when they were promoted from a Senior Dev position.

If you want to be a software architect, not a diagrammer boy, you have to get your hands dirty and understand what works and what doesn’t, get a continuous feel  of the current technologies and tools available, read and play with the frameworks, understand the latest IT trends and risks, keep an eye on performance and scalability issues, and again , play play play with the code.

Owning a small piece of functionality (not piece of code, piece of functionality :) , so feature not layer) will keep you in the loop in all the sprints, you will get a feeling of what is going on in the real world and help you come down from the ivory tower .

A reading recommandation for today (oldies but goldies), is linked to some big extends with our subject : http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileArchitecture.htm

Happy ”prove it with your code” architecture !

More here: http://arialdomartini.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/the-3-most-valuable-qualities-a-candidate-should-have-to-bring-value-to-a-team/

Este in limba romana.

Enjoy!

It’s about common patterns you will meet in your teams. Well, you may read this book for fun or seriously, but I guarantee you will not regret.
See a sample here: http://www.dorsethouse.com/pdf/Preview-Dorset-Adrenaline.pdf

Succes !