Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code

In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues.

Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at...

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code

In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues.

Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success.

Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment.
Clarify what you're trying to accomplish
Choose your tools based on sensible criteria
Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress
Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more legacy code
Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism
Stay in control as systems grow more complex
Achieve rigor without too much rigidity
Learn from history and experience
Distinguish good new software development ideas from bad ones