Review on the book "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software"
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg, published by Three Rivers Press in Feb 2008.
This books tells the story about the development of the Chandler, an open-source personal information management (PIM) application from its inception to November 2005. This is not the complete story because the Chandler application is still being actively developed.
While reading the book, you may see the planned project milestones were always delayed despite the efforts of a team of very talented developers and understanding managers. You know the superficial reasons, e.g., the change in requirement, architecture (e.g. from peer-to-peer to client-server model). However if you were put in the same shoes, probably you would have faced the same problems. That's why software is hard as Donald Knuth says. After reading this book I cannot help admiring these people.
If you are interested in knowing more about what has happened afterwards, you can visit the Chandler Project page. The story is still going on.