Get an inside look at how one of Microsoft's Engineering Excellence directors drives discussions about coding best practices. The popular column, I. M. Wright's "Hard Code," was written by Eric Brechner's alter-ego to help stimulate discussion among development engineers at Microsoft--a proven-effective idea. Deliberately provocative, ideas have been debated and pondered by thousands within Microsoft and have increasingly drawn attention from others in the industry. With this book, these essays are now available to any developer. They are thematically arranged, each helping to spark the imagination, stimulate discussion, and promote debate about software development tasks and processes. They encourage developers to re-examine coding, testing, and software-development project-management practices--and gain insight into their own processes to help drive excellence in large, distributed business groups.