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.

Best Practices

Achieve development goals by determining meaningful metrics with the Goal-Question-Metric approach

Translate those goals to a verifiable Definition of Done

Manage code versions for consistent and predictable modification

Control separate environments for each stage in the development pipeline

Automate tests as much as possible and steer their guidelines and expectations

Let the Continuous Integration server do much of the hard work for you

Automate the process of pushing code through the pipeline

Define development process standards to improve consistency and simplicity

Manage dependencies on third party code to keep your software consistent and up to date

Document only the most necessary and current knowledge