Skip to Main Content
Applied Software Project Management
book

Applied Software Project Management

by Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene
November 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
324 pages
13h 21m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Applied Software Project Management

Chapter 7. Design and Programming

There's a famous quote attributed to Kent Beck, a widely respected software engineer who's responsible for many advances in the field: "I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits." This chapter is about introducing some of those great habits. A good programmer who adopts these habits will build better software.

Programmers spend their time designing and building software, and all of their project work revolves around the source code. But many programming teams find that they lose control of their own code. Sometimes they lose track of the changes that they make; new additions might occasionally disappear, and old bugs routinely pop up. They might lose control of the design of the code, finding that no matter how much care they put into designing the software well, they still end up with messy code that's difficult to maintain. Some programmers have never known any other way, and don't realize that these problems can be eased. A project manager can improve the code by helping the team adopt good programming practices.

While many development problems originate outside of the programming team, there are some basic changes that the programmers can make that will improve the quality of the code they produce. Most teams, even ones with skilled and talented programmers, are vulnerable to the same design and programming problems. These problems can be addressed with a few basic tools and techniques—which can often be put in place ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Project Management for IT-Related Projects, 3rd Edition

Project Management for IT-Related Projects, 3rd Edition

Bob Hughes, Roger Ireland, Brian West, Norman Smith, David I. Shepherd

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009488Errata