Ship It!: A Practical Guide To Successful Software Projects [Brossura]

Ship It! is both a guide to running successful software projects, and a life preserver for projects that are failing. If you've ever worked on a troubled software project, you know what it feels like. The frustration. The sense of impending doom. The urge to polish your resume. We've all been there. So have Richardson and Gwaltney -- and they're offering to leverage their considerable experience to help save you and your project from this fate.

There's not much material that's truly new between these covers, but the presentation and point of view is refreshing. It's a rare book that speaks convincingly to both developers and managers, but this one does a good job. The book describes many of the practices of agile development -- continuous integration, automated testing, lightweight planning -- and combines them into a simple but powerful description of an approach to building software they call "Tracer Bullet Development." But the book doesn't assume you're going to do everything the authors suggest: they expect you to try just one thing as a time.

My favorite part of the book is compendium of one-page essays on common problems software projects have, and how to apply the principles and practices from the book to solve them. Unlike some other rather strained "antipatterns" catalogs that I've read, this section feels very practical and usable.

If your shop has trouble shipping quality software on time -- and let's face it, most do -- then this book is for you. If you're a manager, I'd say that doubly so.

If you are satisfied with being an average developer then this book isn't for you.

It is a good thing to know how to develop great software. It is better to know how to help others become great software developers. This is what the writers of "Ship It!" have done. They have given practical ways for average or good developers to become great at what they do and to begin to help their team develop top level, extremely well tested, reliable software that requires minimal maintenance.

One of the best things I could say about this book is that it is practical. It doesn't come at you with some high level theory or preach at you with an unrealistic unattainable development methodology (they are sometimes unattainable because they require other unwilling participants). This book gives you a number of real things you can begin to do even if no one else is willing to play along. As you make a few of these practices habits, the benefits of the practices become self-evident to the rest of your team and they begin to duplicate the practices that they see you doing. Then your test team, your maintenance team and your customer support team (you do have those teams, right??? OK...Stop laughing... I know most of you wear these hats as well) will love you because you have made their jobs easier. All the customer knows is that this software that you have developed is exactly what they expected and doesn't break anywhere near as many times as the 5 or 6 other applications that they routinely use.

My favorite part of the book is Chapter 5 "Common Problems and How to Fix Them." Also pay close attention to the sections on "Build Automatically" and "Review all Code." The book doesn't just tell you "code reviews are good." You are also told why and how as well as how to know when you are not getting the intended benefit of the practice.

Excellent book and for those of you used to paying over $50 for a good software book, under $20 is an incredible buy.

If you make these practices habits, you can't help but stand out as a great developer as well as helping your team to be as great as it can be.

(...)

I haven't had the chance to read and review any books from the Pragmatic Programmers series. I decided to change that with the book Ship It! - A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr. After finishing the book, I put in an order for a few more titles. If all the titles are this practical and useful, I'll be a happy camper...

Contents: Introduction; Tools and Infrastructure; Pragmatic Project Techniques; Tracer Bullet Development; Common Problems and How to Fix Them; Tip Summary; Source Code Management; Build Scripting Tools; Continuous Integration Systems; Issue Tracking Software; Development Methodologies; Testing Frameworks; Suggested Reading List; Index

Richardson and Gwaltney don't try to add yet another methodology that guarantees your life will be rosy. Basically, that methodology doesn't exist. But there are a number of best practices that they've found from real-world experience, and they share those here. The key word is "practical" (hence the "Pragmatic" part of the series title). Even if you can't necessarily adopt all of their suggestions, you can easily take one or two and merge them into your routine. Once they've changed the way you work, you'll be ready for a few new changes.

For instance, they are really big on automated build processes for your software development that requires a compile and packaging process. Having the process done manually means that it won't get done as often as it should, or it will be machine dependent. Taking the time to learn something like Ant can dramatically improve your effectiveness and productivity. Same with using continuous integration software. If your project is constantly being built and tested without intervention, it's a guarantee that new problems will be caught early and resolved quickly.

After reading this book, I'm planning on investigating the use of a wiki for "The List", as well as possibly downloading Bugzilla to have a formal issue tracking system. For me, that's the sign of a great book... you walk away with a few action items that will change what you do today, not sometime in the future. This is really a "required read" for all software developers, and the sooner you read it, the better...