Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience

Experience is a powerful teacher, but it is also slow and painful — and software practitioners cannot afford to make every mistake others have suffered. This book helps you compress your learning curve and bypass much of the pain by absorbing lessons from others who served in the trenches before you. Drawing on 20+ years helping software teams succeed in nearly 150 organizations, Karl Wiegers presents 60 concise lessons and practical recommendations you can apply to all kinds of projects, regardless of your application domain, technology, development lifecycle, or platform infrastructure.

The principles, perspectives, and philosophical observations Wiegers holds have proven valid for decades, and will remain relevant for many years to come. Embodying both wisdom for deeper understanding and guidance for practical use, they represent an invaluable complement to the technical nuts and bolts software developers usually study.

Software Development Pearls covers multiple crucial domains of project success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Each chapter suggests several first steps and next steps to help you begin immediately applying the author’s hard-won lessons — and writing code that is more successful in every way that matters.