Net Objectives book on Emergent Design available online for feedback
Net Objectives has put online chapters of Scott Bain’s upcoming book on Emergent Design: "This Emergent Design book is a work in progress in which you can participate. Rather than having contributions from readers only serve to spawn and inform a Second Edition, readers can make comments, suggestions, expose errata, ask and answer questions, in short, provide the essential feedback necessary to produce a better book, before the book is committed to paper."From the introduction:
<blockquote>The purpose of this book is to examine what we need, as software developers (or "programmers", if you like) to get that kind of value from what we do, and from each other, and from the practice itself. I’d like to take a step back, look at the nature of what we’re doing, and try to derive a set of best-practices, general wisdom, and specific patterns of activity that will elevate our business into a true "profession", with all the benefits that such a thing provides.
However, it’s not my intention to stay purely theoretical, as interesting as that might be. I want to talk about real things, about the aspects of software development that are too hard, that are too limiting, and to suggest better ways of going about this job that have more value to us.
My contract with you is this: Everything I will investigate, suggest, present, demonstrate, etc… will have as its core intent the goal of improving our lot as creators of software. No matter how interesting or compelling a thing might be, if there’s nothing "in it for us", then I’m going to leave it out.
One thesis I’m going to start off with right now is this: Software development, by its very nature, is a process of evolution. We do not analyze, design, and build; we create something that works, and is of high quality, and is valuable as it stands, and then we evolve it in stages toward the product that the world needs. I’ve got a long way to go to demonstrate this, and in order to get there I’m going to need a set of supportive concepts and techniques.</blockquote>
Go to Emergent Design’s Presentation page and related courses offered by NetObjectives, view the Table of Contents/Feedback page, or jump straight to chapters on [url=http://www.netobjectives.com/emergentdesign/download/paying_attention_to_disciplines_unit_testing%20.pdf]Unit Testing[/url] and Refactoring (PDF format).
