Building Software Teams Ten Best Practices for Effective Software Development

Why does poor software quality continue to plague enterprises of all sizes in all industries? Part of the problem lies with the process, rather than individual developers. This practical guide provides ten best practices to help team leaders create an effective working environment through key adjustments to their process.As a follow-up to their popular book, Building Maintainable Software, consultants with the Software Improvement Group (SIG) offer critical lessons based on their assessment of development processes used by hundreds of software teams. Each practice includes examples of goalsetting to help you choose the right metrics for your team.Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approachTranslate those goals to a verifiable Definition of DoneManage code versions for consistent and predictable modificationControl separate environments for each stage in the development pipelineAutomate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectationsLet the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for youAutomate the process of pushing code through the pipelineDefine development process standards to improve consistency and simplicityManage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to dateDocument only the most necessary and current knowledge