Building Software Teams

Preface

You can’t control what you can’t measure.

Tom DeMarco

Insufficient software quality is a problem of all times and in all industries. We at the Software Improvement Group (SIG) see this time and again in our daily work of source code measurement and code review. That is why we have chosen to share the lessons we have learned with a larger audience. In the companion to this book, Building Maintainable Software: Ten Guidelines for Future-Proof Code, we focused on the contributions made by each individual developer. In that book, we discussed ten guidelines that any practicing software developer should master to consistently write maintainable source code. Those guidelines are based on our experience that lack of software maintainability is largely caused by simple issues that occur over and over again. And thus the best way to improve maintainability is to address these simple issues.

But that is not enough. To fully benefit from those guidelines, developers also need to work as a team according to a shared process. That is the focus of this book. This book discusses ten best practices for getting the development process right such that software is produced of consistently high quality. Our best practices do not just point a development team in the right direction. They are accompanied with a set of metrics that helps the team to consistently execute and monitor them.

Getting software development practices right is essential. The right development process facilitates the ...