A Philosophy Of Software Design

This book is a critical introduction to code and software that develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. Written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background, the book provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms.

An engaging, illustrated collection of insights revealing the practices and principles that expert software designers use to create great software. What makes an expert software designer? It is more than experience or innate ability. Expert software designers have specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles that they apply deliberately during their design work. This book offers sixty-six insights, distilled from years of studying experts at work, that capture what successful software designers actually do to create great software. The book presents these insights in a series of two-page illustrated spreads, with the principle and a short explanatory text on one page, and a drawing on the facing page. For example, “Experts generate alternatives” is illustrated by the same few balloons turned into a set of very different balloon animals. The text is engaging and accessible; the drawings are thought-provoking and often playful. Organized into such categories as “Experts reflect,” “Experts are not afraid,” and “Experts break the rules,” the insights range from “Experts prefer simple solutions” to “Experts see error as opportunity.” Readers learn that “Experts involve the user”; “Experts take inspiration from wherever they can”; “Experts design throughout the creation of software”; and “Experts draw the problem as much as they draw the solution.” One habit for an aspiring expert software designer to develop would be to read and reread this entertaining but essential little book. The insights described offer a guide for the novice or a reference for the veteran—in software design or any design profession. A companion web site provides an annotated bibliography that compiles key underpinning literature, the opportunity to suggest additional insights, and more.

Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that's just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code! Use statistics and data science to uncover both problematic code and the behavioral patterns of the developers who build your software. This combination gives you insights you can't get from the code alone. Use these insights to prioritize refactoring needs, measure their effect, find implicit dependencies between different modules, and automatically create knowledge maps of your system based on actual code contributions. In a radical, much-needed change from common practice, guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Discover a comprehensive set of practical analysis techniques based on version-control data, where each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. Because the techniques are language neutral, you can apply them to your own code no matter what programming language you use. Guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Apply research findings from social psychology to software development, ensuring you get the tools you need to coach your organization towards better code. If you're an experienced programmer, software architect, or technical manager, you'll get a new perspective that will change how you work with code. What You Need: You don't have to install anything to follow along in the book. TThe case studies in the book use well-known open source projects hosted on GitHub. You'll use CodeScene, a free software analysis tool for open source projects, for the case studies. We also discuss alternative tooling options where they exist.

With this practical book, architects, CTOs, and CIOs will learn a set of patterns for the practice of architecture, including analysis, documentation, and communication. Author Eben Hewitt shows you how to create holistic and thoughtful technology plans, communicate them clearly, lead people toward the vision, and become a great architect or Chief Architect. This book covers each key aspect of architecture comprehensively, including how to incorporate business architecture, information architecture, data architecture, application (software) architecture together to have the best chance for the system’s success. Get a practical set of proven architecture practices focused on shipping great products using architecture Learn how architecture works effectively with development teams, management, and product management teams through the value chain Find updated special coverage on machine learning architecture Get usable templates to start incorporating into your teams immediately Incorporate business architecture, information architecture, data architecture, and application (software) architecture together

Strategies for building large systems that can be easily adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications. Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a narrow purpose, with no room to grow. But the best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code. The authors describe techniques they have found effective--over their combined 100-plus years of programming experience--that will help programmers avoid programming themselves into corners. The authors explore ways to enhance flexibility by: Organizing systems using combinators to compose mix-and-match parts, ranging from small functions to whole arithmetics, with standardized interfaces Augmenting data with independent annotation layers, such as units of measurement or provenance Combining independent pieces of partial information using unification or propagation Separating control structure from problem domain with domain models, rule systems and pattern matching, propagation, and dependency-directed backtracking Extending the programming language, using dynamically extensible evaluators

Right Your Software and Transform Your Career Righting Software presents the proven, structured, and highly engineered approach to software design that renowned architect Juval Löwy has practiced and taught around the world. Although companies of every kind have successfully implemented his original design ideas across hundreds of systems, these insights have never before appeared in print. Based on first principles in software engineering and a comprehensive set of matching tools and techniques, Löwy’s methodology integrates system design and project design. First, he describes the primary area where many software architects fail and shows how to decompose a system into smaller building blocks or services, based on volatility. Next, he shows how to flow an effective project design from the system design; how to accurately calculate the project duration, cost, and risk; and how to devise multiple execution options. The method and principles in Righting Software apply regardless of your project and company size, technology, platform, or industry. Löwy starts the reader on a journey that addresses the critical challenges of software development today by righting software systems and projects as well as careers—and possibly the software industry as a whole. Software professionals, architects, project leads, or managers at any stage of their career will benefit greatly from this book, which provides guidance and knowledge that would otherwise take decades and many projects to acquire. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization. You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code: How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions