[teampractices] "It will never work in theory"

[Greg Grossmeier]

Passing along a resource of good reading on the topic of software
engineering practices:

http://neverworkintheory.org/

The person who I found it via said it better than I can:
http://blog.liw.fi/posts/neverworkintheory/

===
It Will Never Work in Theory is a web site that blogs, though slowly, of
important research and findings about software development. It's one of
the most interesting sites I've found recently, possibly for a long
time.

I disagree with the term "software engineering" to describe the software
development that happens today. I don't think it's accurate, and indeed
I think the concept's too much of a fantasy for the term to be used
seriously about practicing developers do. For software development to be
an engineering discipline, it needs a strong foundation based on actual
research. In short, we need to know what works, what doesn't work, and
preferably why in both cases. We don't have much of that.

This website is one example of how that's now changing, and that's good.
As a practicing software developer, I want to know, for example, whether
code review actually helps improve software quality, the speed of
software development, and the total cost of a software project, and also
under what the limits of code review are, how it should be done well,
and what kind of review doesn't work. Once I know that, I can decide
whether and how to do reviews in my development teams.

The software development field is full of anecdotal evidence about these
things. It's also full of people who've done something once, and then
want to sell books, seminars, and lectures about it. That's not been
working too well: it makes research be mostly about fads, and that's no
way to build a strong foundation.

Now I just need the time to read everything, and the brain to understand
big words.
===

I'm still working through it myself.

One of the writeups that caught the attention of Arthur (I hope he
doesn't mind me calling him out on it):
http://neverworkintheory.org/2014/05/01/happy-sw-devs-solve-problems-better.html

Enjoy!

Greg

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