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Product Description
Product Description
Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community. Their insights may surprise you.
- Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others?
- Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster?
- Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software?
- Do design patterns actually make better software?
- What effect does personality have on pair programming?
- What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart?
Contributors include:
Jorge Aranda
Tom Ball
Victor R. Basili
Andrew Begel
Christian Bird
Barry Boehm
Marcelo Cataldo
Steven Clarke
Jason Cohen
Robert DeLine
Madeline Diep
Hakan Erdogmus
Michael Godfrey
Mark Guzdial
Jo E. Hannay
Ahmed E. Hassan
Israel Herraiz
Kim Sebastian Herzig
Cory Kapser
Barbara Kitchenham
Andrew Ko
Lucas Layman
Steve McConnell
Tim Menzies
Gail Murphy
Nachi Nagappan
Thomas J. Ostrand
Dewayne Perry
Marian Petre
Lutz Prechelt
Rahul Premraj
Forrest Shull
Beth Simon
Diomidis Spinellis
Neil Thomas
Walter Tichy
Burak Turhan
Elaine J. Weyuker
Michele A. Whitecraft
Laurie Williams
Wendy M. Williams
Andreas Zeller
Thomas Zimmermann
About the Author
Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.
Greg Wilson has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security, and is currently project lead at Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org). Greg has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has written and edited several technical and children's books, including "Beautiful Code" (O'Reilly, 2007).
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Customer Reviews
found something out about writing software, in a way that
gives you a pretty good idea of what the study really found,
and what it didn't find. Others describe studies and surveys
that expose gaps in our knowledge, so you can spot cases
where people are writing things that nobody knows for sure.
I like dealing with proper facts, not opinions, and I like being able to look at the details of what was done to clarify my understanding of the writeup, so I think this is a big deal. Here are three topics that happened to stick in my mind:
1) Nobody really knows how to do effort estimation, not even
the people with quantitative models (Chapters 1, 3, 6, 15).
2) The usability of tools depends a lot on their users, how
they are used, and for what - so tune or select with
particular scenarios in mind? (Chapters 14, 29)
3) Code review really does work - in fact, even doing a code
review on yourself is worthwhile (Chapter 18).
The editors of this book do a great job of explaining what we can and can not expect from research. They also adopt a very pragmatic mindset, taking the point of view that appropriate practice is highly contextual. Research can provide us with evidence, but not necessarily conclusions.
Beyond the philosophical underpinnings, 'Making Software' outlines research results in a variety of areas. It gives you plenty to think about when considering various approaches on your team. The chapter 'How Effective is Modularization?' is worth the price of the book alone.
I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn how to think rigorously about practice.
It would be a 5 star if someone like Steve McConnell had taken the entire contents of the book and written a single coherent text from it. As it is the quality of writing and explanations varies a lot from article to article. For example, in some of the articles the authors decide to show us the code or the SQL statements used to extract data. I found this distracting (who cares how they pulled data from a database?) because I wanted to get to the meat of each piece. I suspect the book could be 1/2 to 2/3 the size it is today with a rewrite.
Despite my reservations this is a very worthwhile book. If you sit down to read it you'll likely find it hard going in places: it's dense and detailed. But that goes somewhat with the territory. This isn't a book about evangelizing the latest development fad, it's about hard data on what does and does not work in software engineering.
Refreshing, if a bit long.
The articles are divided up into two sections. The first covering general principles reads a lot like a fairly advanced university level textbook and it got really tempting for me to give up on the book a number of times while reading that section which would have been a real pity since the second section covering "Specific Topics in Software Engineering" is far easier to read and a lot more interesting as well.
There is plenty of material in the second section of the book that will help any programmer to improve the way that they write programs. A lot of the alternatives presented are beyond the control of the programmer though and so it is far more important that the managers in charge of programming departments be made aware of the information that this book provides.
While at least some of the information that the book presents should be obvious to any experienced programmer - some of the information may also be completely unexpected. The authors of the articles have done an excellent job though of specifying exactly how they obtained the data upon which their conclusions are based and so it should be reasonably easy to work out just how applicable each should be to any given situation.
I recommend that those without the background to fully understand the material in the first part of the book persevere with it as whatever part of it that you do manage to comprehend will aid in your understanding of what the extremely useful second part of the book actually means.
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