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

Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 2010

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

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Greg Wilson has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security, and is currently project lead at Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org). Greg has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has written and edited several technical and children's books, including "Beautiful Code" (O'Reilly, 2007).

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596808321
• ISBN-13: 978-0596808327
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.3 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #374,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised on Vancouver Island; studied engineering at Queen's University in Ontario, worked for a while, then went to Edinburgh for a Master's, some more work, and a PhD. Traveled while writing my first book on parallel programming; came to Toronto "for a couple of years" in 1994, and have never left. I've worked for big corporations, startups, and myself (prefer the small to the large), been a university professor (enjoyed the teaching more than the red tape), and am now project lead for Software Carpentry, a crash course on software development for scientists and engineers. You can find me online at http://third-bit.com (personal stuff) or http://software-carpentry.org (the course).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A very important book November 22, 2010

By Michael C. Feathers

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm going to go on record and say that this is one of the most important books about software development that has been published in the last few years. It's easy for many of us in the industry to complain that software engineering research is years behind practice and that it is hard to construct experiments or perform studies which produce information that is relevant for practitioners, but fact is, there are many things we can learn from published studies.

The editors of this book do a great job of explaining what we can and can not expect from research. They also adopt a very pragmatic mindset, taking the point of view that appropriate practice is highly contextual. Research can provide us with evidence, but not necessarily conclusions.

Beyond the philosophical underpinnings, 'Making Software' outlines research results in a variety of areas. It gives you plenty to think about when considering various approaches on your team. The chapter 'How Effective is Modularization?' is worth the price of the book alone.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn how to think rigorously about practice.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not fantastic March 21, 2011

By John Graham-Cumming

Format:Paperback

This is an important book and it covers a wide range of topics surrounding software engineering (comparing languages, whether TDD works, open source vs. proprietary, pair programming, metrics, learning to program, women in computer science and much, much more). But I can't give it a 5 star review because I wish it had been distilled down from a large collection of essays to a single book covering the conclusions and the data behind the conclusions.

It would be a 5 star if someone like Steve McConnell had taken the entire contents of the book and written a single coherent text from it. As it is the quality of writing and explanations varies a lot from article to article. For example, in some of the articles the authors decide to show us the code or the SQL statements used to extract data. I found this distracting (who cares how they pulled data from a database?) because I wanted to get to the meat of each piece. I suspect the book could be 1/2 to 2/3 the size it is today with a rewrite.

Despite my reservations this is a very worthwhile book. If you sit down to read it you'll likely find it hard going in places: it's dense and detailed. But that goes somewhat with the territory. This isn't a book about evangelizing the latest development fad, it's about hard data on what does and does not work in software engineering.

Refreshing, if a bit long.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy version of a good book March 18, 2012

By Daan

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Note that this review is for the Kindle version! (Read on a Kindle Keyboard v3.3 using default settings.)

The kindle version of this book is very sloppy. We'll start at the beginning; the table of contents is needlessly indented. I consider indenting content that crosses several pages questionable in any occasion. This makes it even longer than it already is because chapter titles now often need two instead of one line. The book has links to the chapters, but counting that as an advantage in a digital version is like praising page numbers in a hard copy.

The book also offers links to references, but these sometimes span entire paragraphs or pages instead of just the author and year. This also happens to other links throughout the text.

Tables are not properly adjusted for the kindle, last characters of words are on new lines, columns headers are on the previous page, and sometimes columns are just cut off forcing you to decrease the font size. That shouldn't happen at the default font size. Chapter 12 includes an example of all of these.

Now that we're discussing chapter 12; the Clinical TDD Trial References are placed under a bibliography header on the next page instead of under that header (where they belong, as verified with a hard copy). This leaves a blank page. All other chapters have a single references header that avoids this problem.

The book is readable, but it's a very sloppy.