Building Software Teams: Ten Best Practices for Effective Software Development

by Joost Visser, Sylvan Rigal, Gijs Wijnholds

Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process.

As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team.

Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approachTranslate those goals to a verifiable Definition of DoneManage code versions for consistent and predictable modificationControl separate environments for each stage in the development pipelineAutomate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectationsLet the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for youAutomate the process of pushing code through the pipelineDefine development process standards to improve consistency and simplicityManage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to dateDocument only the most necessary and current knowledge

Genres: Leadership, Technology, Management

221 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 12, 2016

Reviews

[meesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relatively short read that covers a number of widely accepted SDLC best practices like CI/CD, TDD, code linting, etc. and shows examples of metrics that can be used to track them.

I recommend it for new college/bootcamp grads that haven't worked in industry yet and are perhaps familiar with technology/theory but not full SDLCs. I don't think it's useful for any professional that's been practicing a few years in a workplace that has embraced or discussed best practices or agile development; it will lack insight and depth for them. The example metrics may be useful for managers looking for inspiration, but most are difficult to instrument existing processes with, and the book will offer little help on that front.

[Alan Heppenstall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good insights but lacking in detail and depth.

[Abbas Yazdanpanah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The books approach to define metrics in a simple way is the most interesting part of the book for me.

[Khalil Saleem · Rating 4 out of 5]

simple instructions

[Vladislav · Rating 2 out of 5]

good only for beginners
but really useful metrics

[David Snook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like the discussion of best practices for software development on teams, especially the focus on metrics that takes them from the realm of hand-waving and into the land of tangible actualities.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not worth reading. This book manages to at once be both overly prescriptive (using absolutes like "always" and "never") yet under-specified by intentionally avoiding mention/usage of specific technologies. I'm not sure who the target audience of this book is supposed to be. To an experienced software engineer, I have to imagine the top-level principles border on obvious common sense; to a novice, the content is not specific/actionable enough to be helpful.

[Jose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very basic and fast to read.

[Betty · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ten best practices make a lot of sense. I would argue that the book doesn't introduce anything new to the table. Yet, it's always good to see a practical guide towards best practices and how to do what everyone is preaching. It is a better read than the maintainability book (by the same authors teams) as it gives a broad perspective over what's happening here. The goals, questions, metrics approach makes the topics understandable and actionable.