Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience (Unabridged)

Experience is a powerful teacher, but it's also slow and painful.

You can't afford to make every mistake yourself! Software Development Pearls helps you improve faster and bypass much of the pain by learning from others who have already climbed the learning curve. Drawing on 25-plus years helping software teams succeed, Karl Wiegers has crystallized 60 concise, practical lessons for all your projects, regardless of your role, industry, technology, or methodology.

Wiegers' insights and specific recommendations cover six crucial elements of success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement. For each, Wiegers offers first steps for reflecting on your own experiences before you start; detailed lessons with core insights, real case studies, and actionable solutions; and next steps for planning adoption in your project, team, or organization. This is knowledge you weren't taught in college or boot camp. It can boost your performance as a developer, business analyst, quality professional, or manager.

Clarify requirements to gain a shared vision and understanding of your real problem; create robust designs that implement the right functionality and quality attributes and can evolve; anticipate and avoid ubiquitous project management pitfalls; grow a culture in which behaviors actually align with what people claim to value; plan realistically for quality and build it in from the outset; use process improvement to achieve desired business results, not as an end in itself; and choose your next steps to get full value from all these lessons.