Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It

· "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
5 reviews
Ebook
624
Pages
Tools
Eligible

About this ebook

Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community. Their insights may surprise you.
  • Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others?
  • Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster?
  • Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software?
  • Do design patterns actually make better software?
  • What effect does personality have on pair programming?
  • What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart?

Contributors include:

Jorge Aranda

Tom Ball

Victor R. Basili

Andrew Begel

Christian Bird

Barry Boehm

Marcelo Cataldo

Steven Clarke

Jason Cohen

Robert DeLine

Madeline Diep

Hakan Erdogmus

Michael Godfrey

Mark Guzdial

Jo E. Hannay

Ahmed E. Hassan

Israel Herraiz

Kim Sebastian Herzig

Cory Kapser

Barbara Kitchenham

Andrew Ko

Lucas Layman

Steve McConnell

Tim Menzies

Gail Murphy

Nachi Nagappan

Thomas J. Ostrand

Dewayne Perry

Marian Petre

Lutz Prechelt

Rahul Premraj

Forrest Shull

Beth Simon

Diomidis Spinellis

Neil Thomas

Walter Tichy

Burak Turhan

Elaine J. Weyuker

Michele A. Whitecraft

Laurie Williams

Wendy M. Williams

Andreas Zeller

Thomas Zimmermann

Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the...

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Ratings and reviews

5 reviews
A Google user
December 3, 2010
This is a set of scholarly research papers which is interesting for, not only the results, but also the methods and the places under study. There are two parts on general principles and specific topics by forty-five authors. The table of contents shows the titles and subjects for thirty chapters, each of which also has a list of references. Part of the book's implicit knowledge comes from how the authors answered their questions as well as how they present the evidence. The question becomes how to measure and improve these skills in other organizations and on a more continuous basis. The most common areas of interest are productivity metrics and measurement. These are shown for different software development process models and code bases. They also look at the limitations of education. There are some new concepts such as socio-technical congruence as a measure of coordination.
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