A clever friend of mine with no background in programming is going to move to a job where he's dealing with a lot of programmers. And I need a bit of advice for him.
Basically: He works in the US Customs Service, and all the Customs Service offices all over the US process import-freight (ceramic frogs, hairpins, "crap" as he calls it) with an ancient and painful legacy computer system, probably written in Ada for all I know. The big problem arises from the fact that the people who mind the code are a bunch of programmers in Washington DC, who have no direct access to the system's actual users -- until now, as that's my friend's new job; he's been using the system for years, and is moving to DC to advise the programmers on improving it. (That's not the whole of his job, but a good chunk of it.)
His situation is unusual because he's not actually managing the programmers (and I don't know if anyone is, really, but that's another story), and he's not specifying features to be added to a not-yet-extant program. Instead he's going to specify new features to be added to this legacy system, sometimes based on users' often-muddleheaded requests for new features.
So I ask all of Perldom: What books should I have my friend read? Is there a Clifford The Big Red Dog book on Extreme Programming?
Either post a reply here or email me at sburke@cpan.org
