| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £12.95
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change (Agile Software Development) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £12.95, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
—Matthew Heusser, Software Process Naturalist
“Inertia: It’s what restricts change and leads to a cost of making a change or starting a change after a period of no investment or maintenance. This book explains in great detail what the different types of debt are that lead to inertia and, ultimately, to a cost to the business in managing software maintenance and development. The richness of explanation in this book of how to manage the virtual debt that every business incurs is unmatched. Every business-focused CIO, enterprise architect, software architect, or project manager should have a copy.”
—Colin Renouf, Enterprise Architect
“Software debt is an important concept and Sterling does a sterling job of explaining what it is, why it is bad, and how to avoid it. A healthy dose of theory sprinkled with lots of pragmatic examples.”
—Roger Sessions, CTO, ObjectWatch (objectwatch.com)
“Chris Sterling’s experience in Agile architecture and his focus on software debt make this book a must-read for architects and engineers on Agile teams.”
—Jan Bosch, VP Engineering Process, Intuit
“This book offers highlights and shortcomings of managing inherited software code and the debts that come with quality software. The author offers a unique perspective on dealing with software development issues. A must-read for all software developers.”
—Leyna Cotran, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine
“The vital importance of rapid feedback to the software process is a fundamental premise of modern software methods. When such feedback is quantified in the form of software debt, the software process becomes most effective. Chris Sterling’s book holds the details you need to know in order to quantify the debt and pay it back. Moreover, it will teach you how to avoid debt in the first place.”
—Israel Gat, The Agile Executive (theagileexecutive.com and on Twitter at @agile_exec)
“This book represents a wonderful opportunity for a larger community to take advantage of Chris’s many years of experience and his innovative approaches to Agile architecture and continuous quality. . . . His book distills many of his principles and techniques into practical guidelines, and he manages to convey very powerful ideas in accessible prose, despite the inherent complexity of architecture and technical debt. . . . Chris’s book will help architects, leaders, and teams see their way to better systems and better organizational performance.”
—Evan Campbell, Founder of Chinook Software Consulting
Product Description
In Managing Software Debt, leading Agile expert Chris Sterling shows how understanding software debt can help you move products to market faster, with a realistic plan for refactoring them based on experience. Writing for all Agile software professionals, Sterling explains why you’re going into software debt whether you know it or not—and why the interest on that debt can bring projects to a standstill. Next, he thoroughly explains each form of software debt, showing how to plan for it intelligently and repay it successfully. You’ll learn why accepting software debt is not the same as deliberate sloppiness, and you’ll learn how to use the software debt concept to systematically improve architectural agility. Coverage includes
- Managing tensions between speed and perfection and recognizing that you’ll inevitably ship some “not quite right” code
- Planning to minimize interest payments by paying debts quickly
- Building architectures that respond to change and help enterprises run more smoothly
- Incorporating emergent architecture concepts into daily activities, using Agile collaboration and refactoring techniques
- Delivering code and other software internals that reduce the friction of future change
- Using early, automated testing to move past the “break/fix” mentality
- Scripting and streamlining both deployment and rollback
- Implementing team configuration patterns and knowledge sharing approaches that make software debt easier to repay
- Clearing away technical impediments in existing architectures
- Using the YAGNI (“you ain’t gonna need it”) approach to strip away unnecessary complexity
Using this book’s techniques, senior software leadership can deliver more business value; managers can organize and support development teams more effectively; and teams and team members can improve their performance throughout the development lifecycle.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
As its title suggests, this book goes even further than the concept of technical debt as it try to cover all dimensions of software development debt. My favorite chapter comes at the end where the notion of experience debt is explored. I have witnessed many projects where the technical or product knowledge was concentrated on fewer and fewer people, due to change in project team composition, effectively making them the bottlenecks where all application evolutions had to be processed. We sometimes create more debt in the heads than in the code.
The book is well written and easy to read. Every chapter begins with a mindmap of the topic that will be explored, thus giving a big picture of its content. The material mixes high level definitions with practical examples and real life stories. A summary is proposed at the end of each chapter
At every stage of the software development life cycle, we make decisions that have long term consequences. This book provides meaningful insights on how to prevent creating too much debt and how to reduce the existing burden. I will recommend it to everybody who is concerned with software quality with a longer view than the end of the next iteration.
I have recently read the book "Managing Software Debt" by Chris Sterling and must say I am quite impressed. The author does a fantastic job explaining the subject and provides a lot of guidance on how to deal with the issue. If you want to talk about ROI, this book is so packed with ideas and inspiration, it should cost thousands. The author maintains an open mind throughout the book, and by reading this, you do too.
The author addresses software debt at many levels, more than I knew existed. This book is part of the Agile Software Development Series, but I think this is a core book everyone involved in a software project should read (chickens and pigs). I am surprised to see so few books on the topic, but this book is so well put together, I don't know if other books are needed.
Buy it, read it, follow it.
The descriptions of how debt creeps into the process was excellent.
My five favorite parts were:
"abuse stories" (anti-use cases)
the last chapter - people aren't resources and why this matters along with styles of teams
the word "done" repeatedly being in quotes and an exercise on how to create a definition
the cost of someone else paying the cost of your poor decisions
why silos create debt
I made lots of highlights and was engaged as I read. I didn't make notes in the book because some would be less than favorable to someone who could pick it up. It definitely hit home though.
I would have liked some more tips on how to deal with debt and how to prevent it. The book was certainly thought provoking and raised my awareness of debt in day to day work.
---
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
