Creating A Software Engineering Culture

This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright © 1996). Written in a remarkably clear style, Creating a Software Engineering Culture presents a comprehensive approach to improving the quality and effectiveness of the software development process. In twenty chapters spread over six parts, Wiegers promotes the tactical changes required to support process improvement and high-quality software development. Throughout the text, Wiegers identifies scores of culture builders and culture killers, and he offers a wealth of references to resources for the software engineer, including seminars, conferences, publications, videos, and on-line information. With case studies on process improvement and software metrics programs and an entire part on action planning (called “What to Do on Monday”), this practical book guides the reader in applying the concepts to real life. Topics include software culture concepts, team behaviors, the five dimensions of a software project, recognizing achievements, optimizing customer involvement, the project champion model, tools for sharing the vision, requirements traceability matrices, the capability maturity model, action planning, testing, inspections, metrics-based project estimation, the cost of quality, and much more! Principles from Part 1 Never let your boss or your customer talk you into doing a bad job. People need to feel the work they do is appreciated. Ongoing education is every team member’s responsibility. Customer involvement is the most critical factor in software quality. Your greatest challenge is sharing the vision of the final product with the customer. Continual improvement of your software development process is both possible and essential. Written software development procedures can help build a shared culture of best practices. Quality is the top priority; long-term productivity is a natural consequence of high quality. Strive to have a peer, rather than a customer, find a defect. A key to software quality is to iterate many times on all development steps except coding: Do this once. Managing bug reports and change requests is essential to controlling quality and maintenance. If you measure what you do, you can learn to do it better. You can’t change everything at once. Identify those changes that will yield the greatest benefits, and begin to implement them next Monday. Do what makes sense; don’t resort to dogma.

This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright (c) 1996). Written in a remarkably clear style, " Creating a Software Engineering Culture " presents a comprehensive approach to improving the quality and effectiveness of the software development process. In twenty chapters spread over six parts, Wiegers promotes the tactical changes required to support process improvement and high-quality software development. Throughout the text, Wiegers identifies scores of culture builders and culture killers, and he offers a wealth of references to resources for the software engineer, including seminars, conferences, publications, videos, and on-line information. With case studies on process improvement and software metrics programs and an entire part on action planning (called "What to Do on Monday"), this practical book guides the reader in applying the concepts to real life. Topics include software culture concepts, team behaviors, the five dimensions of a software project, recognizing achievements, optimizing customer involvement, the project champion model, tools for sharing the vision, requirements traceability matrices, the capability maturity model, action planning, testing, inspections, metrics-based project estimation, the cost of quality, and much more Principles from Part 1 Never let your boss or your customer talk you into doing a bad job. People need to feel the work they do is appreciated. Ongoing education is every team member's responsibility. Customer involvement is the most critical factor in software quality. Your greatest challenge is sharing the vision of the final product with the customer. Continual improvement of your software development process is both possible and essential. Written software development procedures can help build a shared culture of best practices. Quality is the top priority; long-term productivity is a natural consequence of high quality. Strive to have a peer, rather than a customer, find a defect. A key to software quality is to iterate many times on all development steps except coding: Do this once. Managing bug reports and change requests is essential to controlling quality and maintenance. If you measure what you do, you can learn to do it better. You can't change everything at once. Identify those changes that will yield the greatest benefits, and begin to implement them next Monday. Do what makes sense; don't resort to dogma.

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

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues. Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success. Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment. Clarify what you're trying to accomplish Choose your tools based on sensible criteria Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code" Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism Stay in control as systems grow more complex Achieve rigor without too much rigidity Learn from history and experience Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

Accelerate Your Pursuit of Software Excellence by Learning from Others' Hard-Won Experience "Karl is one of the most thoughtful software people I know. He has reflected deeply on the software development irritants he has encountered over his career, and this book contains 60 of his most valuable responses." -- From the Foreword by Steve McConnell, Construx Software and author of Code Complete "Wouldn't it be great to gain a lifetime's experience without having to pay for the inevitable errors of your own experience? Karl Wiegers is well versed in the best techniques of business analysis, software engineering, and project management. You'll gain concise but important insights into how to recover from setbacks as well as how to avoid them in the first place." --Meilir Page-Jones, Senior Business Analyst, Wayland Systems Inc. Experience is a powerful teacher, but it's also slow and painful. You can't afford to make every mistake yourself! Software Development Pearls helps you improve faster and bypass much of the pain by learning from others who already climbed the learning curves. Drawing on 25+ years helping software teams succeed, Karl Wiegers has crystallized 60 concise, practical lessons for all your projects, regardless of your role, industry, technology, or methodology. Wiegers's insights and specific recommendations cover six crucial elements of success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement. For each, Wiegers offers First Steps for reflecting on your own experiences before you start; detailed Lessons with core insights, real case studies, and actionable solutions; and Next Steps for planning adoption in your project, team, or organization. This is knowledge you weren't taught in college or boot camp. It can boost your performance as a developer, business analyst, quality professional, or manager. Clarify requirements to gain a shared vision and understanding of your real problem Create robust designs that implement the right functionality and quality attributes and can evolve Anticipate and avoid ubiquitous project management pitfalls Grow a culture in which behaviors actually align with what people claim to value Plan realistically for quality and build it in from the outset Use process improvement to achieve desired business results, not as an end in itself Choose your next steps to get full value from all these lessons Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.