Mind the communication gap

Dr Dobbs Journal recently ran an article about communicating with managers. Coming from such a technical magazine it indicates the high degree of interest in software development's soft issues. (It's nearly 30 years after the publication of Peopleware and the software industry is still coming to terms with the fact that most problems are people-problems and not technical-problems, sigh.) As far as the article goes, I'm not sure that the strict categorisation of good and bad managers is particularly helpful. Using that kind of language, we could rewrite the whole article to discuss how managers can communicate with good and bad developers. No, in a nutshell it boils down to this: "communicate early, communicate often, and communicate honestly."