Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects

Many software projects run into trouble, and many never ship at all. Others run like well-oiled machines. This book shows you the basics of how to get your project well on the road to success.

Ship It! bucks current fashion trends and marketing hype; instead, you’ll find page after page of solid advice, all tried and tested in the real world: a collection of tips that show you what tools a successful team has to use, and how to use them well. You’ll get quick, easy-to-follow advice on modern techniques and when they should be applied.

Few of the ideas presented here are controversial or extreme; most experienced programmers will agree that this stuff works. Yet 50 to 70 percent of all project teams in the U.S. aren’t able to use even these simple, well-accepted practices effectively. This book will help you get started.

Ship It! begins by introducing the common technical infrastructure that every project needs. Readers can choose from a variety of recommended technologies according to their skills and budgets to get the job done. The next section outlines the necessary steps to get software out the door reliably, using well-accepted, easy-to-adopt, best-of-breed practices that really work.

You’ll:

• Use the right tools to guide and protect your project, and tame those that can hurt you
• Effectively manage features and issues to keep both users and managers happy
• Improve everyone’s communication and collaboration using simple techniques
• Recognize how great developers and great managers work in concert—and how to fix it when they don’t
• Know how to answer the Frequently Asked Questions and fix the common problems that everyone faces on modern projects

Finally, and most importantly, Ship It! presents common problems and danger signs that arise and offers real-world advice on how to solve them, in the widely-accepted form of a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

Some popular methodologies are based on academic theory or one-off, lucky projects. The practices, ideas, and tools presented here were born in the real world, and represent the best of modern software development techniques with a few novel twists and helpful insights.

This book is suitable for anyone interested in applying pragmatic principles to modern software development.

This book is for you if:

• You’re frustrated at lack of progress on your project.
• You want to make yourself and your team more valuable.
• You’ve looked at methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) and felt they were too, well, extreme.
• You’ve looked at the Rational Unified Process (RUP) or CMM/I methods and cringed at the learning curve and costs.
• You need to get software out the door without excuses

In short, you need this book if you want to Ship It!.

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