High-quality software demands high-quality management. That's the subject of Quality Software Management, a four-volume series that has grown out of acclaimed author Gerald M. Weinberg's forty-year love affair with computers. In Volume 1, Systems Thinking, the author tackles the first requirement for developing quality software: learning to think correctly—about problems, solutions, and quality itself. He also sets out guidelines that stimulate the kind of thinking needed. "Act early, act small" is key to staying in control of the software process. Managers need to serve as both planners and catalysts within the organization: to continually plan what to do, observe what happens, and then act decisively to bring the actual closer to the planned. Numerous examples illustrate "control points," areas that can be managed to prevent a crisis or to keep one from getting worse. Topics include: * understanding quality * pressure and breakdowns * software cultures * patterns of quality * patterns of management * feedback effects * the size/complexity dynamic in software engineering * detecting failures and reacting to them * fault resolution dynamics * the role of customers. Useful diagrams, references, exercises, and a bibliography augment the text.
In the first of three volumes about quality, management, and productivity, Weinberg discusses software development organizations in terms of their culture, and he observes the patterns of their behavior. Organizations can be classified as one of six cultural patterns, ranging from Pattern One (obvio
Software project managers and their team members work individually towards a common goal. This book guides both, emphasizing basic principles that work at work. Software at work should be pleasant and productive, not just one or the other. This book emphasizes software project management at work. The author's unique approach concentrates on the concept that success on software projects has more to do with how people think individually and in groups than with programming. He summarizes past successful projects and why others failed. Visibility and communication are more important than SQL and C. The book discusses the technical and people aspects of software and how they relate to one another. The first part of the text discusses four themes: (1) people, process, product, (2) visibility, (3) configuration management, and (4) IEEE Standards. These themes stress thinking, organization, using what others have built, and people. The second part describes the software management principles of process, planning, and risk management. Part three discusses software engineering principles, the technical aspects of software projects. The fourth part examines software practices giving practical meaning to the individual topics covered in the preceding chapters. The final part of this book continues these practical aspects by illustrating a sample project through seven distinctive documents.
This is part 1 of the latest edition of the classic series, Quality Software. It teaches how to understand the dynamics of software development organizations, to plan software projects, and to act effectively to carry out those plans. Written from a technical and psychological perspective, this comprehesive book describes how to think about what you do. The notation takes almost no effort to learn. The diagrams are simple and easy to understand and used in a consistent manner. How Software is Built offers ideas for coping with the very difficult problems that face those who work on projects where they don't have enough time, enough information, enough skill, or enough money to do a perfect job of anything. Given these limitations, managers have to make tradeoff decisions in light of the best understanding of cause and effect they can muster. Reviewers say the book is a treasure, containing within it the best definitions of quality ever published. It's written with a great sense of humor that helps make the lessons and insights you will get from the book easier to take. For example, why is software development so often plagued by crisis? Weinberg helps the reader step back from developing software and examine the dynamics and patterns of software creation. By discussing patterns of quality, patterns of managing, and patterns of software faults, the author shows that quality software begins with keen observation and clear thinking about software development. The text is extremely thought-provoking and is spiced with anecdotes drawn from decades of software experience. The book is divided into three sections: "Patterns of Quality," "Patterns of Managing," and "Demands that Stress Patterns." Each section has a number of chapters that examine different systemic aspects of the specific issues. In the "Patterns of Quality" section, Weinberg challenges our assumptions about what quality is, how to obtain it, and how to recognize how to change it. For those of you who are intimate with the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) CMM (Capability Maturity Model), this section provides compelling reasoning about the model, and about how dangerous level 2 can be to an organization. One reviewer said of The "Patterns of Managing" section: "It was truly eye opening for me. I had been working on a measurement system at the company, and had been spectacularly unsuccessful obtaining useful metrics. I thought we needed these measurements so that we could understand what worked for us, and what needed to change. This section gave me a new understanding of how other people see the organization and their roles within the organization." "Demands that Stress Patterns" discusses what happens in real organizations with real customers and real products. How Software is Built develops a number of ideas about how to keep the development organization working productively.
In the first of three volumes about quality, management, and productivity, Weinberg discusses software development organizations in terms of their culture, and he observes the patterns of their behavior. Organizations can be classified as one of six cultural patterns, ranging from Pattern One (obvio
It is often assumed that software testing is based on clearly defined requirements and software development standards. However, testing is typically performed against changing, and sometimes inaccurate, requirements. The third edition of a bestseller, Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement, Third Edition provides a continuous quality framework for the software testing process within traditionally structured and unstructured environments. This framework aids in creating meaningful test cases for systems with evolving requirements. This completely revised reference provides a comprehensive look at software testing as part of the project management process, emphasizing testing and quality goals early on in development. Building on the success of previous editions, the text explains testing in a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) environment, the building blocks of a Testing Center of Excellence (COE), and how to test in an agile development. Fully updated, the sections on test effort estimation provide greater emphasis on testing metrics. The book also examines all aspects of functional testing and looks at the relation between changing business strategies and changes to applications in development. Includes New Chapters on Process, Application, and Organizational Metrics All IT organizations face software testing issues, but most are unprepared to manage them. Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement, Third Edition is enhanced with an up-to-date listing of free software tools and a question-and-answer checklist for choosing the best tools for your organization. It equips you with everything you need to effectively address testing issues in the most beneficial way for your business.
This book is designed for professionals and students in software engineering or information technology who are interested in understanding the dynamics of software development in order to assess and optimize their own process strategies. It explains how simulation of interrelated technical and social factors can provide a means for organizations to vastly improve their processes. It is structured for readers to approach the subject from different perspectives, and includes descriptive summaries of the best research and applications.
The emergence of a true systemic science - the systemic one - capable of rigorously addressing the many problems posed by the design and management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore urgently needed if wants to be able to provide satisfactory answers to the many profoundly systemic challenges that humanity will have to face at the dawn of the third millennium. This emergence is of course not easy because one can easily understand that the development of the systemic is mechanically confronted with all the classical disciplines which can all pretend to bring part of the explanations necessary to the understanding of a system and which do not naturally see a good eye a new discipline claim to encompass them in a holistic approach ... The book of Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to this new emerging scientific and technical discipline: it is indeed first of all one of the very few "serious" works published in French and offering a good introduction to the systemic. It gives an extremely broad vision of this field, taking a thread given by the architecture of systems, in other words by the part of the systemic that is interested in the structure of systems and their design processes, which allows everyone to fully understand the issues and issues of the systemic. We can only encourage the reader to draw all the quintessence of the masterful work of Jacques Printz which mixes historical reminders explaining how the systemic emerged, introduction to key concepts of the systemic and practical examples to understand the nature and the scope of the ideas introduced.
