Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers

by Steve McConnell

Renowned software expert Steve McConnell helps software students transition to the role of software professionals. Significant developments are afoot that will impact the future careers of student programmers, including initiatives in education, professional development, certification, and licensing. Some of these developments are well thought out and positive; others are being forced and need to be improved before they are standardized. Software development is changing, whether programmers recognize it or not. Programmers who are not paying attention could easily find themselves working as twenty-first century software janitors. This book describes the occupation of computer programming as it exists today and the profession of software engineering as it can exist in the future.

Genres: Programming, Software, Computer Science, Business, Nonfiction, Technology, Computers

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2003

Reviews

[Amy Gilchrist Thorne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can understand why many people sound as though they were disappointed with this book. It's not a "practical" book, like Code Complete, Rapid Development, or Software Estimation, that you can immediately put into practice and improve your software's code or schedules.

But whether or not you agree with McConnell's conclusions about how to "fix" software development by turning it into a profession, like engineering, medicine, or law, I think it does a good job highlighting some of the ongoing struggles in developing software and making you at least think about them.

I agree that some of the solutions McConnell advocates seem overly-regimented and out-of-touch with what is currently often promoted as best-practice, namely agile development.

I also understand why people might think the author seems to keep going on about best practices, but never getting to the "real content" of telling us what those best practices are. From some of his allusions to them, they seem to be those described in Part 3 of Rapid Development.

[James Boyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, short book.

References are super useful.

[Igor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Managers probably should read this book. But don't sure that that it is helpfull for programmer.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended. If all software developers read this book (and why not? It's pretty short and written very simply) the field would greatly benefit. McConnell fills the pages with statistics and references to supporting works. It's almost a bibliography for software development best practices. The most interesting statistics have to do with the comparisons between the top-performing software development organizations and the bottom-performing ones. The gulf yawns wide between them. It definitely makes a convincing case that we all need to look at what those top-performing organizations are doing. My only worry about this one is that it may be getting outdated. Most of the references are from the 1990s and early 2000s.

[Ashkan Saeedi Mazdeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this years ago so I do not remember exact details but the general ideas of the book about software development processes and processes in general were both good and pragmatic. As always McConnel is both pragmatic and practical but still really tries to improve things. He brings data as much as he can and still does not shut down his imagination which is a hard quality to find these days.
If you are interested in improving your company's software development practices or want to know how different fields did formalize , this is a very good book to pick up.

[Sergey Teplyakov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Книга произвела неоднозначное впечатление. С одной стороны у Стива, как всегда, много умных и интересных мыслей, но, с другой стороны, наблюдается явный перегиб в сторону "инженерии ПО". И перегиб этот заключается в том, что все мысли по поводу этой самой "инженерии" являются практически бесполезными конечному программисту, а полезны скорее крупным организациям, университетам.

[Ganius · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://gtanuel.blogs.friendster.com/g...
(sorry, in Bahasa Indonesia, and could be shifted to some other place in the future)

[Brian Yamabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite. I care about software development, but I don't want to be part of a formal heirarchy and over site organization.

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ma note de lecture complète en français ici