Cultivating Successful Software Systems Development Projects: A Practitioner's View (SPECIAL EDITION/CORP SALE ONLY) - Hardcover

1.

Motivation, whose purpose is to convince you that the rest of the book is worth reading.

2.

Project Planning Process, whose purpose is to provide you with practical guidance for effectively planning software systems development work.

3.

Software Systems Development Process, whose purpose is to (1) define principles for putting together a software systems development process that breeds success and (2) illustrate these principles by defining a top-level process that you can use to formulate a process for your environment.

4.

Change Control Process, whose purpose is to define change control board (CCB) mechanics and provide you with practical guidance for setting up a CCB for your software systems development process.

5.

Product and Process Reviews, whose purpose is to describe basic processes associated with the various reviews called out in Chapter 3 as a means for reducing software systems development risk.

6.

Measurement, whose purpose is to provide you with practical guidance for measuring the "goodness" of products and the "goodness" of the software systems development process that produced the products; the focus is on how to use measurement to achieve consistent product and process "goodness."

7.

Cultural Change, whose purpose is to address human issues bearing on bringing about organizational cultural change during implementation of your systems engineering environment (SEE).

8.

Process Improvement Planning, whose purpose is to provide practical guidance on how to write an SEE implementation plan to establish the framework for doing the things discussed in the preceding chapters.
Table P-1 highlights what you will learn from each chapter. To help you extract each chapter's messages and subsequently apply its concepts, we condense each chapter's key points (except Chapter 1) into what we label "nuggets." In general, the material is organized to help you extract what you need. The book's approximately 240 figures aim at highlighting essential points. In these figures, we communicate ideas through icons to facilitate information retrieval and assimilation.
We also include worked-out examples containing sufficient detail so that you can adapt the concepts illustrated to your organization. For instance, in Chapter 6, we address measurement. We focus on two metrics that we call "product integrity index" and "process integrity index." We give general formulas for these indexes. We show you how to set up value scales for these indexes in terms that make sense to your organization. Through detailed, worked-out examples, we show you how to calculate these indexes. F inally, we explain what these numbers mean.
At the end of the book, we include an annotated bibliography. Most of the bibliographic entries have been selected because of their practitioner bent. This bibliography is intended to (1) point you to alternative treatments of topics that we discuss, (2) help you gain greater insight into topics that we address, and (3) help you pursue topics that we only touch upon that may be of greater interest to you.
The book's central concept for housing an organization's development processes is the systems engineering environment (SEE). The SEE consists of the following two complementary components:
An application development process environment (ADPE) and An application development technology environment (ADTE).
The ADPE is that set of policies, guidelines, procedures, and standards defining an organization's way of doing business. These entities we call "ADPE elements." The ADTE is that set of technologies (e.g., personal computers, networks, CASE tools) used to develop th

A systematic approach to consistently successful software development.

It's no longer enough for software development projects to succeed some of the time; you need to deliver excellence, consistently. Cultivating Successful Software Development: A Practitioner's View presents the first systematic approach to making sure that all the software systems you develop meet the highest standards.

It introduces the first coherent model for a mature software development process, the Systems Engineering Environment (SEE). This model comprises two fundamental, interlocked elements: the policies and procedures that define how software development is performed, and the technologies available to get the job done.

Using the SEE framework, you'll walk through every step of the software development process-from planning, through coding, through maintenance. You'll learn how to measure where you are—and where you should be. Then you'll learn how to go beyond quantification, discovering proven ways to make the cultural changes your organization needs to improve software quality. Discover how you can:

* Establish and nourish an ongoing, productive dialogue between developers and customers
* Manage the multiple constituencies, personalities issues and egos that complicate software development
* Create plans that reflect the need for change—and take into account real-world risks
* Write clearer, more useful contracts and statements of work

Cultivating Successful Software Development includes more than 200 figures, process diagrams and annotated outlines—all designed to help you understand and implement better processes quickly, and with less resistance to perceived (real or imagined) losses.

This book's techniques will work with any software quality methodology you choose, as well as SEI's capability maturity models and ISO 9000. They will work with any development technology, from CASE to object-oriented design to rapid prototyping. And they will work for you whether you're a programmer, manager, or customer. When it comes to delivering better software, if you need to get results, you need Cultivating Successful Software Development.