I like this book as a means to present the ways people describe how software is developed. However, as I read I'm itching to annotate it with notes on "what really happens". I've worked in this business for a few decades now, in various locations and various sizes of companies, including a few that are household names. I have NEVER seen software built on the ground in exactly the ways one sees documented (documented anywhere, not just in this book).
A couple of things I don't see mentioned (apologies if they're in there, I haven't read every word):
1. Process does (and should) vary tremendously depending on factors including the organization size, organization maturity, market maturity, experience level of the people involved, budget, etc. The book seems to suggest that there's a one-process-to-rule-them-all.
2. Often there are significant unknowns about a project : unknown technologies, unknown market needs, unknown requirements. Being able to accommodate the unknowns, which can mean not expending effort trying to know something unknowable, is important. The book I think gives an impression of quite confident smooth progress toward project completion that I personally have never observed.
Also: The value of Rubber Chickens is not mentioned...
Yes, it does mention these things. Perhaps not early enough? The "really happens"/disasters are towards the end of Part I, and there are few project cartoons giving hints.
There's so much to cover, I started out with the formal stuff first. It seemed like a good order, but perhaps it is a bit off-putting at the beginning of the book.
+1 million for pointing out that process/workflow can and should vary according to many factors.
Watching an organization stress in vain to assert a one-size-fits-all approach, such as letter-of-the-law Agile, is unpleasant, especially once the political games set in. Even worse to be on the team and actively shunted from being able to do your job because of all the boilerplate, parochial adherence to cargo-cult process.
Author here, writing this book was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and there is seemingly no end to the small issues I've faced (both writing and technical). Would appreciate some feedback to make it as good as it can be, AMA thanks.
The separation of design and construction into phases is a hangover from civil engineering. It has the baked in assumption that the design phase is relatively cheap, short and somewhat unpredictable the construction phase is expensive, long and predictable. The root problem is the assumption that specifications can be validated for correctness, like a blueprint for a bridge can. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a persistent myth in software development.
Only have skimmed it so far, but it looks great. Will look more soon. Off the bat though, I was looking at it on Amazon and the 'look inside' seems to scrunch up some of the text. Not sure if this is something an author can do anything about, but wanted to make you aware. I'm viewing this on Windows 10, Chrome 51, normal zoom level, and with minimal plugins. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/uXuELxv
First off great job, it looks like you put a bunch of hard work into this. One area for improvement is the images. Currently some of the more information dense ones are hard to read at small sizes and clicking on them does nothing. Perhaps expand them to full size on a click?
Wow - nice job! I just skimmed it, but it looks great - will read more later. With all the superficial, error-ridden, and rambling books being published these days (packt, etc.), it's a pleasure to see something information-dense, accurate, and also high-quality.
Thanks for writing and sharing this. It's not something I dived into deeply so feel free to ignore my opinion. But the main thing I feel this book lacks is a "show don't tell" mentality. I haven't read the content close enough to judge how insightful the technical nuts and bolts are. But one thing I learned only after working in software dev is the human aspect behind the pace and rhythm and success of projects. It's not just code and processes, but why such processes were implemented a n the first place.
I'm violating my own principle, so I'll give an example: the book, Enterprise Rails, opens with a chapter titled, " The Tale of Twitter". Here's an excerpt:
> Because Twitter was the largest, most public Rails site around, its stumbles were watched carefully, and the steps Twitter took to alleviate its scalability issues were thoroughly documented online. In one instance, the database was becoming a bottleneck. In response, Twitter added a 16 GB caching layer using Memcache to allow them to scale horizontally. Still, many queries involving complex joins were too slow. In response, the Twitter team started storing denormalized versions of the data for faster access. In a another instance, Twitter found its use of DRb, a mechanism for remote method invocation (RMI), had created a fragile single point of failure. It replaced DRb with Starling, a distributed messaging queue that gave it looser coupling of message producers and consumers, and better fault tolerance.
> It is of no small significance that Twitter’s engineers chose to absolve Rails of being at fault for their problems; instead of offloading the blame to an external factor, they chose to take responsibility for their own design decisions. In fact, this was a wise choice. Twitter’s engineers knew that reimplementing the same architecture in a different language would have led to the same result of site outages and site sluggishness. But online rumor mills were abuzz with hints that Twitter was planning to dump Ruby and Rails as a platform. Twitter’s cofounder, Evan Williams, posted a tweet (shown in Figure 1 ) to assure everyone that Twitter had “no plans to abandon RoR.”
It's not that every chapter should open up with a jaunty Malcolm Gladwell-seque tale about the life of loves of professional development. But some of your assertions could be made more compelled with some real-world examples:
> As a student of computer science and programming, you’ve learned a significant portion of what you need to know as a rookie professional. The most difficult parts perhaps, but far from the “whole enchilada.”
There's nothing wrong with that statement. But there's not much to it besides filler that students have been told for their entire college education. You yourself must have a few personal examples of what the first week of work taught you that 4 years of college didn't. And/or, you may remember a few interns who, despite their college pedigree, found themselves to be completely over their heads. Just even a couple of sentences of showing how you came to learn the wisdom you now dispense goes a long way.
Anyway, sorry for the extended critique. I am obviously skipping over the part above to how damn hard it can be to find compelling stories :)
In a book like this, I'd like to see cost estimation mentioned earlier than Chapter 8. I'd argue that in nearly all software development projects (particularly the ones where this sort of book applies) the cost of implementation is one of the key factors in evaluating requirements. If you put together your requirements without considering their cost, you end up with a project that's too expensive to build, and you want to know that during the Requirements Gathering phase, not later on during construction. Even Agile projects need to start out with a rough idea of what's being built and a rough idea of what it'll cost to build it. Otherwise how does the person funding the project decide whether or not to approve it?
Of course, as we all know providing estimates during the requirements phase is very difficult, especially if they're treated as hard commitments rather than rough ballparks. Chapter 2 mentions that getting requirements wrong is a key factor in causing software projects to fail; I'd say that the reason for that is usually because of the implementation costs of the known requirements that were estimated inaccurately or not at all, and the implementation costs of requirements that aren't discovered until later. It always comes down to cost; I think it's relatively rare for a software project to fail because a requirement turned out to be impossible to implement. (Unless it involves AI. You always have to watch for people trying to sneak in an AI requirement.)
At my uni our Software Engineering I (CS301 or maybe it was II[CS302]) class was entirely based on requirements gathering and estimation.
It was a real eye opener for me- I'd been writing code in many languages since I was 10, but this was my first glimpse at "that other stuff" that takes up the majority of one's day.
All in all, I feel like it prepared me for what I would face in the real world. We had to do stakeholder interviews where the professor or a TA played the role of unforthcoming/neurotic stakeholder, were introduced to various general document types like stakeholder analysis, cost/benefit analysis, requirements overviews, etc. and the last 1/3 was pretty much applying all the interviews and data to an estimation process. We also did a greenfield project, an additional functionality project, and a system replacement project to work through the pitfalls of each.
I also think it was the first time I read The Mythical Man Month and Waltzing with Bears.
The two things, by far, that stick out about recent college grads (or really, new developers in general) are the inability to estimate and gather requirements and a complete lack of knowledge around source control.
GitHub and a lot of projects that are based around checking project source out has made a lot of Junior devs more familiar with at least the idea of source control, but very little prepares them for the flailing and hand wringing that comes with estimation.
Thanks to the author -- it does like like your labour of love and written with some personality. (That's a good thing!) Attractive layout, lots of insets/quotes/diagrams, and sources. Will read more later.
The "Models & Methodologies" chapters looks great. It may become my new "here, read this!" when people ask me "what's agile?" or "how else?"
Thank you, I've tried to do exactly that, give new people a good overview with not too much information at once, and encourage further study with copious references.
I'm disappointed to see a book aimed at "professional" developers continue to spread outdated and debunked information, such as the NIST "study" adduced as evidence for the imperative necessity of "defect cost containment". See my post on the topic: https://plus.google.com/+LaurentBossavit/posts/8QLBPXA9miZ
I'll add my voice to those that have already stated such a book shouldn't start by assuming the SDLC as a reference model: it embodies too many of those outdated assumptions. More in that vein in my own book http://leanpub.com/leprechauns
I haven't read all of it yet but it also seems to miss the vein of development that has led to movements such as Correct by Construction et al. The idea that we should model our computations in a high-level specification and check that those designs meet our goals and hold the invariants we press upon them.
Instead there's Agile and the idea that we can throw together something that roughly works and iterate until our confidence is enough such that we can release it. The so-called, beta-driven-development. (Perhaps a vestigial remnant of the unix philosophy?).
I'm not arguing that formal methods should be used for every software project. I think Carmack was right to point out that if all software was written like the software at JPL we'd be decades behind where we are now. However I do think that it should be a part of the experience of becoming a programmer so that when we encounter hard problems we have the correct instincts to rely on mathematics to help us.
The NIST study graphic matched another from the book Code Complete, to illustrate the cost of defects. I did not have access to the CC graph so I used it instead.
Do you believe the larger point (about cost of defects) is incorrect? Your g+ critique seems to take issue with the details of the study, but I missed an assertion it is wrong.
As to the wikipedia timeline, I cherry picked from it. The point being to pick the important things a student should know, not list everything possible. Seems your WP edits didn't make it through?
Definitely touch on a lot of topics here. And all looks well organized. It also does look like a laundry list of buzzwords and techspeak.
Obviously this wouldn't be used to teach anyone any particular topic in detail but to get them familiar with the general concepts/steps involved in software dev.
Edit:
The two books I read that I thought covered these ideas well were Code Complete and Code Craft. But it's been about a decade now. Perhaps they're too dated.
> It also does look like a laundry list of buzzwords and techspeak.
Thanks, interesting. I've tried to define difficult terms, and it is aimed at a technical audience, but there is definitely room for improvement. If there are any readers having trouble, I'd appreciate hearing where. Will take a look myself as well.
Kudos to the author for tackling this huge and controversial topic.
Read first several chapters and picked up the impression that the author doesn't put enough effort to point out how the processes/practices can (and should) be completely different depending on the circumstances. If a startup tries to use the same processes as Google or Facebook, it'll be dead in the water. If SpaceX engineers write software the same way as SnapChat does it, we will never see their rockets leaving launch pads.
Interesting book. I'll take some time to do a read through. A few things that bother me though off the bat:
1. Anything that uses the word 'protip' can not be taken seriously. I think this needs a law. 'The Law Of Silly Programming Memes - Anything using the word 'protip' cannot be taken seriously'
2. The 800px width format in the world of responsive design gives me pause. Basically this says 'I'm for mobile - screw you'. I would hope that a better format for this would be chosen in the future.
Oh, always read "protip" on reddit with a smile. It is aimed at the young, sounds like you're being a bit chatinho.
Also thought it was recognized that narrow columns are easier to read, such as in a newspaper. It uses the well-regarded "read the docs" theme. Maybe zoom would help?
Here's some for you collection given I see some omissions. Cleanroom, always omitted (sighs), is a big one as it was doing agile-like development in 80's with code so reliable it was sometimes warrantied. Also one of first, formal methods that didn't require a mathematician to use. Fagan's Software Inspection Process came before that in the 70's. I throw in Praxis and 001 for good measure as they're engineered software methods with better results than Cleanroom albeit at higher cost. Leave off plenty of others too constrained for most software development but did prove out in smaller projects. The B Method & Chlipala's Certified Programming in Coq are examples if you want to Google around.
Note: Altran/Praxis Correct by Construction is a modern high-assurance method with numerous successes. Cost a 50% premium for nearly defect-free systems. SPARK Ada is GPL these days.
Note: Margaret Hamilton, who helped invent software engineering on Apollo mission, deserves mention for the first tool that automated most of software process. You can spec a whole system... one company specified their whole factory haha... then it semi-automates design then automatically does code, testing, portability, requirements traces, and so on. Guarantees no interface errors, which are 80+% of software faults. Today's tools have better notations & performance but still can't do all that for general-purpose systems: always a niche.
Note: Added Eiffel method to make up for fact that I have little to nothing on OOP given I don't use OOP. Meyer et al get credit for a powerful combo of language features and methodology in Eiffel platform with huge impact on software. Specifically, Design-by-Contract has so many benefits that even SPARK and Ada both added it to their languages. Just knocks out all kinds of problems plus can support automated generation of tests and such.
So, there's you some reading on methods of making robust software that might fit into your book or something else you do. :)
[+] [-] dboreham|9 years ago|reply
A couple of things I don't see mentioned (apologies if they're in there, I haven't read every word):
1. Process does (and should) vary tremendously depending on factors including the organization size, organization maturity, market maturity, experience level of the people involved, budget, etc. The book seems to suggest that there's a one-process-to-rule-them-all.
2. Often there are significant unknowns about a project : unknown technologies, unknown market needs, unknown requirements. Being able to accommodate the unknowns, which can mean not expending effort trying to know something unknowable, is important. The book I think gives an impression of quite confident smooth progress toward project completion that I personally have never observed.
Also: The value of Rubber Chickens is not mentioned...
[+] [-] dankohn1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
There's so much to cover, I started out with the formal stuff first. It seemed like a good order, but perhaps it is a bit off-putting at the beginning of the book.
[+] [-] p4wnc6|9 years ago|reply
Watching an organization stress in vain to assert a one-size-fits-all approach, such as letter-of-the-law Agile, is unpleasant, especially once the political games set in. Even worse to be on the team and actively shunted from being able to do your job because of all the boilerplate, parochial adherence to cargo-cult process.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbauman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveslash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RubenSandwich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NuDinNou|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|9 years ago|reply
As a proponent of Continuous Delivery, I found the part on releases a bit old-fashioned and slightly disappointing.
I can elaborate a bit more if you want, but most likely you're already familiar with the more iterative and automated approaches.
Everybody has their pet peeves, I guess.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12081603
...was meant for you. I knew you were in the thread but wrongly assumed you submitted the thread itself.
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
I'm violating my own principle, so I'll give an example: the book, Enterprise Rails, opens with a chapter titled, " The Tale of Twitter". Here's an excerpt:
https://dan.chak.org/enterprise-rails/preface/
> Because Twitter was the largest, most public Rails site around, its stumbles were watched carefully, and the steps Twitter took to alleviate its scalability issues were thoroughly documented online. In one instance, the database was becoming a bottleneck. In response, Twitter added a 16 GB caching layer using Memcache to allow them to scale horizontally. Still, many queries involving complex joins were too slow. In response, the Twitter team started storing denormalized versions of the data for faster access. In a another instance, Twitter found its use of DRb, a mechanism for remote method invocation (RMI), had created a fragile single point of failure. It replaced DRb with Starling, a distributed messaging queue that gave it looser coupling of message producers and consumers, and better fault tolerance.
> It is of no small significance that Twitter’s engineers chose to absolve Rails of being at fault for their problems; instead of offloading the blame to an external factor, they chose to take responsibility for their own design decisions. In fact, this was a wise choice. Twitter’s engineers knew that reimplementing the same architecture in a different language would have led to the same result of site outages and site sluggishness. But online rumor mills were abuzz with hints that Twitter was planning to dump Ruby and Rails as a platform. Twitter’s cofounder, Evan Williams, posted a tweet (shown in Figure 1 ) to assure everyone that Twitter had “no plans to abandon RoR.”
It's not that every chapter should open up with a jaunty Malcolm Gladwell-seque tale about the life of loves of professional development. But some of your assertions could be made more compelled with some real-world examples:
> As a student of computer science and programming, you’ve learned a significant portion of what you need to know as a rookie professional. The most difficult parts perhaps, but far from the “whole enchilada.”
There's nothing wrong with that statement. But there's not much to it besides filler that students have been told for their entire college education. You yourself must have a few personal examples of what the first week of work taught you that 4 years of college didn't. And/or, you may remember a few interns who, despite their college pedigree, found themselves to be completely over their heads. Just even a couple of sentences of showing how you came to learn the wisdom you now dispense goes a long way.
Anyway, sorry for the extended critique. I am obviously skipping over the part above to how damn hard it can be to find compelling stories :)
[+] [-] tootie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DougWebb|9 years ago|reply
Of course, as we all know providing estimates during the requirements phase is very difficult, especially if they're treated as hard commitments rather than rough ballparks. Chapter 2 mentions that getting requirements wrong is a key factor in causing software projects to fail; I'd say that the reason for that is usually because of the implementation costs of the known requirements that were estimated inaccurately or not at all, and the implementation costs of requirements that aren't discovered until later. It always comes down to cost; I think it's relatively rare for a software project to fail because a requirement turned out to be impossible to implement. (Unless it involves AI. You always have to watch for people trying to sneak in an AI requirement.)
[+] [-] manyxcxi|9 years ago|reply
It was a real eye opener for me- I'd been writing code in many languages since I was 10, but this was my first glimpse at "that other stuff" that takes up the majority of one's day.
All in all, I feel like it prepared me for what I would face in the real world. We had to do stakeholder interviews where the professor or a TA played the role of unforthcoming/neurotic stakeholder, were introduced to various general document types like stakeholder analysis, cost/benefit analysis, requirements overviews, etc. and the last 1/3 was pretty much applying all the interviews and data to an estimation process. We also did a greenfield project, an additional functionality project, and a system replacement project to work through the pitfalls of each.
I also think it was the first time I read The Mythical Man Month and Waltzing with Bears.
The two things, by far, that stick out about recent college grads (or really, new developers in general) are the inability to estimate and gather requirements and a complete lack of knowledge around source control.
GitHub and a lot of projects that are based around checking project source out has made a lot of Junior devs more familiar with at least the idea of source control, but very little prepares them for the flailing and hand wringing that comes with estimation.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptybits|9 years ago|reply
The "Models & Methodologies" chapters looks great. It may become my new "here, read this!" when people ask me "what's agile?" or "how else?"
http://mixmastamyk.bitbucket.org/pro_soft_dev/models.html
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Morendil|9 years ago|reply
Or again the Wikipedia page on the history of software engineering, which is frightfully inadequate. https://plus.google.com/+LaurentBossavit/posts/gpSwoWn4CBK
I'll add my voice to those that have already stated such a book shouldn't start by assuming the SDLC as a reference model: it embodies too many of those outdated assumptions. More in that vein in my own book http://leanpub.com/leprechauns
[+] [-] agentultra|9 years ago|reply
Instead there's Agile and the idea that we can throw together something that roughly works and iterate until our confidence is enough such that we can release it. The so-called, beta-driven-development. (Perhaps a vestigial remnant of the unix philosophy?).
I'm not arguing that formal methods should be used for every software project. I think Carmack was right to point out that if all software was written like the software at JPL we'd be decades behind where we are now. However I do think that it should be a part of the experience of becoming a programmer so that when we encounter hard problems we have the correct instincts to rely on mathematics to help us.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
Do you believe the larger point (about cost of defects) is incorrect? Your g+ critique seems to take issue with the details of the study, but I missed an assertion it is wrong.
As to the wikipedia timeline, I cherry picked from it. The point being to pick the important things a student should know, not list everything possible. Seems your WP edits didn't make it through?
[+] [-] Achshar|9 years ago|reply
Edit: It's as mixmastamyk says. I created a repo called 'achshar.bitbucket.org' and it works.
[+] [-] jgowans|9 years ago|reply
https://www.aerobatic.com/
SSL, custom domains, static generator auto-builds, etc.
disclaimer: co-founder of Aerobatic
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buckbova|9 years ago|reply
Obviously this wouldn't be used to teach anyone any particular topic in detail but to get them familiar with the general concepts/steps involved in software dev.
Edit:
The two books I read that I thought covered these ideas well were Code Complete and Code Craft. But it's been about a decade now. Perhaps they're too dated.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
Thanks, interesting. I've tried to define difficult terms, and it is aimed at a technical audience, but there is definitely room for improvement. If there are any readers having trouble, I'd appreciate hearing where. Will take a look myself as well.
[+] [-] namiller2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
(More information is at the bottom of the intro/title page under Acknowledgements).
[+] [-] arethuza|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Pleasures
[+] [-] phonon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphmedia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennethjiang|9 years ago|reply
Read first several chapters and picked up the impression that the author doesn't put enough effort to point out how the processes/practices can (and should) be completely different depending on the circumstances. If a startup tries to use the same processes as Google or Facebook, it'll be dead in the water. If SpaceX engineers write software the same way as SnapChat does it, we will never see their rockets leaving launch pads.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascotan|9 years ago|reply
1. Anything that uses the word 'protip' can not be taken seriously. I think this needs a law. 'The Law Of Silly Programming Memes - Anything using the word 'protip' cannot be taken seriously'
2. The 800px width format in the world of responsive design gives me pause. Basically this says 'I'm for mobile - screw you'. I would hope that a better format for this would be chosen in the future.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
Also thought it was recognized that narrow columns are easier to read, such as in a newspaper. It uses the well-regarded "read the docs" theme. Maybe zoom would help?
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88....
Note: An academic recently combined Cleanroom with Python for some nice results given how high-level Python is. I thought Haskell would be more ideal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Defect
Note: Describes Fagan process with relevant links.
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/jjoshi/Devsec/CorrectnessByConstruct...
Note: Altran/Praxis Correct by Construction is a modern high-assurance method with numerous successes. Cost a 50% premium for nearly defect-free systems. SPARK Ada is GPL these days.
http://htius.com/Articles/articles.htm
Note: Margaret Hamilton, who helped invent software engineering on Apollo mission, deserves mention for the first tool that automated most of software process. You can spec a whole system... one company specified their whole factory haha... then it semi-automates design then automatically does code, testing, portability, requirements traces, and so on. Guarantees no interface errors, which are 80+% of software faults. Today's tools have better notations & performance but still can't do all that for general-purpose systems: always a niche.
https://www.eiffel.com/values/design-by-contract/introductio...
Note: Added Eiffel method to make up for fact that I have little to nothing on OOP given I don't use OOP. Meyer et al get credit for a powerful combo of language features and methodology in Eiffel platform with huge impact on software. Specifically, Design-by-Contract has so many benefits that even SPARK and Ada both added it to their languages. Just knocks out all kinds of problems plus can support automated generation of tests and such.
So, there's you some reading on methods of making robust software that might fit into your book or something else you do. :)
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecesena|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fncodr|9 years ago|reply
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