Book excerpt: Writing code is the easy part of your work as a software developer. This practical book lets you explore the other 90%—everything from requirements discovery and rapid prototyping to business analysis and designing for maintainability. Instead of providing neatly packaged advice from on high, author Gregory Brown presents detailed examples of the many problems developers encounter, including the thought process it takes to solve them. He does this in an unusual and entertaining fashion by making you the main character in a series of chapter-length stories. As these stories progress, the examples become more complex, and your responsibilities increase. Together, these stories take you on a journey that will make you question and refine the way you think about, and work on, software projects. Steps in this unique journey include: Using prototypes to explore project ideas Spotting hidden dependencies in incremental changes Identifying the pain points of service integrations Developing a rigorous approach towards problem-solving Designing software from the bottom up Data modeling in an imperfect world Gradual process improvement as an antidote for over-commitment The future of software development