[1] Wayne A. Babich, Software Configuration Management: Coordination for Team Productivity. Addison-Wesley, 1986.

A very readable, and fairly short, book on the essential software engineering discipline of Configuration Management. Clearly explains the underlying principles, which you need to understand even if you are using Version Control software to track your configurations.

[2] Barry Boehm, Software Engineering Economics. Prentice-Hall, 1981.

A comprehensive reference book, packed with facts and figures - though now dated. The fault correction costs are quoted in Software Inspection by Tom Gilb and Dorothy Graham, Addison-Wesley, 1993, and elsewhere.

[3] Frederick P. Brooks, Jr, The Mythical Man-month, 20th anniversary edition. Addison-Wesley, 1995.

This 1975 classic is still the best description of the problems of large-scale software development. The current edition also contains Brooks' 1986 essay No Silver Bullet and an assessment of more recent developments. Many of Brooks' ideas have been adopted or adapted by more recent software development projects - see, for example, [15].

[4] Mary Beth Chrissis, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum, CMMI: Guidelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement. Addison-Wesley, 2003.

This is the definitive work on Capability Maturity Model Integration, which brings together the various strands of CMM that branched out of Humphrey's original work [10].

[5] Tony Collins and David Bicknell, Crash: Learning from the World's Worst Computer Disasters. Simon & Schuster, 1998.

A good non-technical account, by two computer industry journalists, of several failures in major software projects. See also [16] for an update (2004); it would appear that not much has changed in the intervening six years.

[6] Philip B. Crosby, Quality is Free. McGraw-Hill, 1979.

The best-known work by the originator of the 'Zero Defects' school of Quality Management, which has achieved wide popularity, especially in the USA - though it is less highly regarded in Japan [13]. A good source on Quality Costs.

[7] W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

A Quality Management classic. Deming was a founder of the post war Quality movement in both the USA and Japan. He severely criticises Western industrial practices, in a well-argued case that draws heavily on his own observations.

[8] DISC TickIT Office, The TickIT Guide: Using ISO 9001:2000 for Software Quality Management System Construction, Certification and Continual Improvement, issue 5.0. DISC (a division of the British Standards Institution), 2001.

This provides essential guidance on ISO 9001 for software organisations. It supersedes the TickIT Guide issue 4.0. See also ISO 12207:1995: Information technology - Software life cycle processes, which provides a taxonomy of software processes, activities and tasks, and [12].

[9] John Guaspari, I Know It When I See It. AMACOM (a division of the American Management Association), 1991.

A short and readable introduction to Quality Management. In a light-hearted style, it succinctly conveys the main Quality principles.

[10] Watts S. Humphrey, Managing the Software Process. Addison-Wesley, 1989.

The original work on the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model. The CMM is an approach to Software Process Improvement and audit against five specified 'capability maturity levels'. It is especially popular in the USA.

[11] International Standards Organisation, ISO 9000:2000: Quality management systems - Requirements. International Standards Organisation (also available as a British Standard from BSI), 2000.

ISO 9001, part of the ISO 9000:2000 series, is the definitive standard against which software organisations are audited. It includes substantial changes from the previous edition, ISO 9001:1994.

[12] International Standards Organisation, ISO/IEC 90003:2004: Software engineering - Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:2000 to computer software. International Standards Organisation (also available as a British Standard from BSI), 2004.

This standard provides an interpretation, from a software organisation's standpoint, of the quality management requirements of [11]. It supersedes ISO 9000-3:1997.

[13] Kaoru Ishikawa, What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way. Prentice-Hall, 1985.

Another Quality Management classic. Ishikawa was one of the Japanese pioneers, who built on Deming's ideas to lead the world in Quality. His book presents an alternative approach to that of Western experts such as Crosby.

[14] J. M. Juran and Frank M. Gryna, Quality Planning and Analysis, third edition. McGraw-Hill, 1993.

A text-book by Juran, one of the leaders of the post-war Quality movement.

[15] Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, version 3.0, 2002. <URL:http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar>

This paper contrasts the "bazaar" model of software development, adopted in Open Source environments such as that of Linux, with the more conventional "cathedral" model followed in the commercial software world. It is illustrated with a case history of a project, successfully carried out by Raymond using this method.

[16] Royal Academy of Engineering and British Computer Society, The Challenges of Complex I.T. Projects. The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2004. <URL:http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/attach/215.pdf>

This is the report of a study aimed at improving the understanding of how complex I.T. projects differ from other engineering projects, with a view to identifying ways to augment the successful delivery of I.T. projects. It includes a number of case studies, and provides an interesting update on [5].

[17] John Seddon, The Case Against ISO 9000, second edition. Oak Tree Press, 2000.

This work argues that ISO 9000 institutionalises an outdated 'command and control' mentality and the discredited 'inspection-based' approach to quality. Therefore, Seddon maintains, it fails to deliver improved quality, and has actually damaged many companies that have implemented it.

[18] Jennifer Stapleton, Dynamic Systems Development Method. Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998.

This book describes the Dynamic Systems Development Method, a popular version of the Rapid Application Development approach. Key features include incremental development of requirements throughout the project, incremental deliveries throughout the project, prioritising of requirements and "time boxing".

[19] Edward Yourdon, Decline & Fall of the American Programmer. Prentice-Hall, 1992.

This is a readable and provocative work on the problems facing the U.S. software industry at the time of publication. Yourdon has published a sequel, Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer.