Software Development Process Improvement

Object Technology, coupled with strong software engineering and process management skills is the key to delivering real business value in Client Server systems. Software Craftsmanship Inc. acts as a change agent for it’s collaborative partners, to enable them to fully exploit the opportunities inherent in the combination of Objects and RAD.

The Applying the Lessons of eXtreme Programming talk contains some interesting process improvement ideas that could usefully be applied to most projects. Specific ideas include

• Applying the Quality First strategy, as opposed to the usual add features and functionality then try (and usually fail) to get enough bugs out so that the system can ship.
• Nominating the role of Coach, ensuring that there is always someone on the project with the specific responsibility of ensuring that everyone is working at the top of their game. (Sports teams have managers and coaches in case anyone thinks that this is the managers job.)
• Relentless testing, it is sure easy working on projects with a complete regression test suite, and really stressful working without that safety net.
• Continuous Integration, say no to Integration Hell, make sure your entire system always works.

My quality assurance checklists for Use Cases and OO designs are now available.