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.

  Autorentext

  David Farley, founder and consultant for Continuous Delivery Ltd., has been a programmer, software engineer, and systems architect since the early days of modern computing. He has shaped ground-breaking approaches that have transformed how developers and teams work. With Jez Humble, Farley coauthored the best-seller Continuous Delivery. As Head of Software Development for the London Multi Asset Exchange (LMAX), he built one of the world's fastest financial exchanges. One of the earliest adopters of agile techniques employing iterative development, continuous integration, and high levels of automated testing, he also coauthored the Reactive Manifesto. Dave also runs the popular and highly successful "Continuous Delivery" YouTube channel.

  Klappentext

  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.

  Inhalt

  Foreword xvii
  Preface xxi
  Acknowledgments xxv
  About the Author xxvii

  Part I: What Is Software Engineering? 1

  Chapter 1: Introduction 3
  Engineering--The Practical Application of Science 3
  What Is Software Engineering? 4
  Reclaiming "Software Engineering" 5
  The Birth of Software Engineering 7
  Shifting the Paradigm 8
  Summary 9

  Chapter 2: What Is Engineering? 11
  Production Is Not Our Problem 11
  Design Engineering, Not Production Engineering 12
  A Working Definition of Engineering 17
  Engineering != Code 17
  Why Does Engineering Matter? 19
  The Limits of "Craft" 19
  Precision and Scalability 20
  Managing Complexity 21
  Repeatability and Accuracy of Measurement 22
  Engineering, Creativity, and Craft 24
  Why What We Do Is Not Software Engineering 25
  Trade-Offs 26
  The Illusion of Progress 26
  The Journey from Craft to Engineering 27
  Craft Is Not Enough 28
  Time for a Rethink? 28
  Summary 30

  Chapter 3: Fundamentals of an Engineering Approach 31
  An Industry of Change? 31
  The Importance of Measurement 32
  Applying Stability and Throughput 34
  The Foundations of a Software Engineering Discipline 36
  Experts at Learning 36
  Experts at Managing Complexity 37
  Summary 38

  Part II: Optimize for Learning 41

  Chapter 4: Working Iteratively 43
  Practical Advantages of Working Iteratively 45
  Iteration as a Defensive Design Strategy 46
  The Lure of the Plan 48
  Practicalities of Working Iteratively 54
  Summary 55

  Chapter 5: Feedback 57
  A Practical Example of the Importance of Feedback 58
  Feedback in Coding 60
  Feedback in Integration 61
  Feedback in Design 63
  Feedback in Architecture 65
  Prefer Early Feedback 67
  Feedback in Product Design 68
  Feedback in Organization and Culture 68
  Summary 70

  Chapter 6: Incrementalism 71
  Importance of Modularity 72
  Organizational Incrementalism 73
  Tools of Incrementalism 74
  Limiting the Impact of Change 76
  Incremental Design 77
  Summary 79

  Chapter 7: Empiricism 81
  Grounded in Reality 82
  Separating Empirical from Experimental 82
  "I Know That Bug!" 82
  Avoiding Self-Deception 84
  Inventing a Reality to Suit Our Argument 85
  Guided by Reality 88
  Summary 89

  Chapter 8: Being Experimental 91
  What Does "Being Experimental" Mean? 92
  Feedback 93
  Hypothesis 94
  Measurement 95
  Controlling the Variables 96
  Automated Testing as Experiments 97
  Putting the Experimental Results of Testing into Context 98
  Scope of an Experiment 100
  Summary 100

  Part III: Optimize for Managing Complexity 103

  Chapter 9: Modularity 105
  Hallmarks of Modularity 106
  Undervaluing the Importance of Good Design 107
  The Importance of Testability 108
  Designing for Testability Improves Modularity 109
  Services and Modularity 115
  Deployability and Modularity 116
  Modularity at Different Scales 118
  Modularity in Human Systems 118
  Summary 120

  Chapter 10: Cohesion 121
  Modularity and Cohesion: Fundamentals of Design 121
  A Basic Reduction in Cohesion 122
  Context Matters 125
  High-Performance Software 128
  Link to Coupling 129
  Driving H…