Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process.
As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team.
- Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approach
- Translate those goals to a verifiable Definition of Done
- Manage code versions for consistent and predictable modification
- Control separate environments for each stage in the development pipeline
- Automate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectations
- Let the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for you
- Automate the process of pushing code through the pipeline
- Define development process standards to improve consistency and simplicity
- Manage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to date
- Document only the most necessary and current knowledge
Joost Visser is Head of Research at the Software Improvement Group (SIG). Joost also holds a position as professor of Large Scale Software Systems at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam and has published over 100 papers on topics such as generic programming, program transformation, green computing, software quality, and software evolution. Sylvan Rigal works as a software quality consultant at SIG since 2011 and is advising clients on managing their IT since 2008. He holds a MSc in international business from Maastricht University, The Netherlands (2006). As an active member of SIG's software security team, Sylvan trains consultants on analyzing software security risks. Gijs Wijnholds joined the Software Improvement Group in 2015 as a software quality consultant in public administration. He helps clients get in control of their software projects by advising them on development processes and translating technical risks into strategic decisions. Gijs holds a BSc in AI from Utrecht University and a MSc degree in Logic from University of Amsterdam. Gijs Wijnholds joined the Software Improvement Group in 2015 as a software quality consultant in public administration. He helps clients get in control of their software projects by advising them on development processes and translating technical risks into strategic decisions. Gijs holds a BSc in AI from Utrecht University and a MSc degree in Logic from University of Amsterdam.
