Software Engineering Fundamentals

By David Farley
Jan 23, 2022

📄 Contents

␡

An Industry of Change?
The Importance of Measurement
Applying Stability and Throughput
The Foundations of a Software Engineering Discipline
Experts at Learning
Experts at Managing Complexity
Summary

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This chapter is from the book 

Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

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Experts at Learning

Science is humanity’s best problem-solving technique. If we are to become experts at learning, we need to adopt and become skilled at the kind of practical science-informed approach to problem-solving that is the essence of other engineering disciplines.

It must be tailored to our problems. Software engineering will be different from other forms of engineering, specific to software, in the same way that aerospace engineering is different from chemical engineering. It needs to be practical, light weight, and pervasive in our approach to solving problems in software.

There is considerable consensus among people who many of us consider to be thought leaders in our industry on this topic. Despite being well known, these ideas are not currently universally or even widely practiced as the foundations of how we approach much of software development.

There are five linked behaviors in this category:

Working iteratively
Employing fast, high-quality feedback
Working incrementally
Being experimental
Being empirical

If you have not thought about this before, these five practices may seem abstract and rather divorced from the day-to-day activities of software development, let alone software engineering.

Software development is an exercise in exploration and discovery. We are always trying to learn more about what our customers or users want from the system, how to better solve the problems presented to us, and how to better apply the tools and techniques at our disposal.

We learn that we have missed something and have to fix things. We learn how to organize ourselves to work better, and we learn to more deeply understand the problems that we are working on.

Learning is at the heart of everything that we do. These practices are the foundations of any effective approach to software development, but they also rule out some less effective approaches.

Waterfall development approaches don’t exhibit these properties, for example. Nevertheless, these behaviors are all correlated with high performance in software development teams and have been the hallmarks of successful teams for decades.

Part II explores each of these ideas in more depth from a practical perspective: How do we become experts at learning, and how do we apply that to our daily work?

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