Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It 1st Edition

by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)

12 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0596808327

ISBN-10: 0596808321

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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

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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).

Paperback: 624 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 30, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596808321
ISBN-13: 978-0596808327
Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 12 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #459,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #517 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Software Design & Engineering
- #1123 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development
- #1700 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Programming Languages

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The best introduction to Empirical Software Engineering

February 16, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Read this book, read this book, read this book, read this book.

Okay, I don't think that actually convinced you to buy this book, so I should explain why. Let me start by asking a question: is code duplication - copy-pasting code - a bad practice? Most people would say yes. Question two: does the flue vaccine protect you from the flu? Again, most people would say yes. Final question: which of the two are you more confident in? "Vaccinations work" is backed up by rigorous studies and controlled trials. "Code duplication is bad" is backed up by anecdotes and common sense.

It's also wrong. Godfrey and Kasper have tentatively found that in many cases, code duplication leads to more correct and maintainable code than practicing DRY or adding abstractions. Trusting our common sense is seductive but easily leads us astray. Belief without empirical evidence is just faith.

Unfortunately, researching software engineering is extremely challenging. Challenging enough that many of us programmers think it's impossible. And many of us who think it's possible also think it doesn't affect us, that there's not much we can learn about our day-to-day jobs. _Making Software_ is about the research and why it matters. The first five chapters are about how software research is done, especially how we compensate for the complexities of the field. The rest of the book are papers about specific topics. The papers cover a wide range of research methods, so you can see how researchers use ethnographies, data mining, etc. It shows that software research can, in fact, be done.

This would make it worth reading for fans of the field. What really makes the book stellar is how much conventional wisdom the papers break. Group code review is a waste of time. Open plans are (sometimes) more productive than private offices. Up-front architecture beats extreme programming. And copy-paste sometimes beats DRY. Of course, you're free to argue with any conclusions you disagree with. Every paper helpfully includes the threats to validity, so you know the weaknesses and limitations of the paper. But we have to be careful when doing so, because we're the ones without evidence.

If you are at all interested in the empirical side of software engineering, you should read this book. 0 out of 5.

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D Philip Wasserman

Good book on improving your process

April 18, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book is a collection of chapters on how to improve software development through empirically proven methods. In addition to good advice, the book teaches you how to conduct your own research, allowing you to customize to your own environment. It can be dry at times, but there is a wealth of material within the pages.

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Michael C. Feathers

A very important book

November 22, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified 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.

51 people found this helpful

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June 14, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

It's a excellent book for all professionals in software engineering.
Making Software presents to each chapter a good experience for software industry and professionals in this area.
It's great.
I recomend it for academics and professionals.

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Daan

Sloppy version of a good book

March 18, 2012

Format: Kindle EditionVerified 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.

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Most recent customer reviews

Flavio B. Botelho

Not for a programmer

Not meant for a programmer to have insights into producing software. It is more geared towards a computer engineering researcher...

Published on February 10, 2014

Marc Magrans De Abril

long, heterogenoeus, and with better alternatives

Data and information are two different things. Unfortunately it seems that the editor and authors didn't had the time to reduce the size of the book and polish the style.Read more

Published on December 19, 2012

Stephen Chapman

Ask Felgall - Book Review

Thirty articles and thirty four different authors but you can't really tell that from reading the content as all of the material fits together extremely well.Read more

Published on December 22, 2011

Benjamin C. Meyer

Replaces Mythical Man Month

Hearing about this book on a HN comment I picked it up only to be blown away. This book contains so much core good information that I would not be surprised to see it references...Read more

Published on September 9, 2011

John Graham-Cumming

Good, but not fantastic

This is an important book and it covers a wide range of topics surrounding software engineering (comparing languages, whether TDD works, open source vs.Read more

Published on March 21, 2011

David Crow

Great mix of real-world and academic advice

This is a must read book for people making software. It provides empirical evidence, insight and discussion around myths in the software development community.Read more

Published on February 22, 2011

C. T. Brown

A very important book.

If you've ever wondered what we actually *know* about (for example) how personality affects productivity, and -- more importantly -- want to know *what evidence there is* behind...Read more

Published on December 1, 2010

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