Building Software Teams

Chapter 12. Next Steps

Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire. (The secret of being boring is to tell everything.)

Voltaire

Of course, there are more best practices for software development than those discussed in this book. At this point you will know the essential ingredients of a mature development process. The power of these practices and their metrics is that you can make improvement visible and manageable.

Applying the Best Practices Requires Persistence

We know, it is a bit of a downer. The best practices in this book will only work for disciplined and persistent teams. Persistence requires discipline and a belief that what you are doing is right. Discipline is not about being in the office at the same time every day or having a clean desk. It is about working consistently, standing your ground, and being able to say “for this issue we will not make an exception.”

Persistence also implies patience. It takes time to master best practices and that will require an investment in time.

One Practice at a Time

We have presented our ten best practices in an order that reflects the typical order in which you want to accomplish them. For instance, Continuous Integration (Chapter 7) cannot possibly be effective without version control (Chapter 4) and to benefit fully from it, requires automated testing (Chapter 6). Of course, often they appear together. For example, when defining the DoD (Chapter 3), this is part of documentation (Chapter 11). In fact, all best practices ...