Creating a Software Engineering Culture

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Summary: A guide to steering a software group toward higher quality.
Review: A culture based on a commitment to quality software development and management differentiates a team that practices excellent software engineering from a gaggle of individual programmers doing their best to ship code. In a healthy software engineering culture, the focus on quality is present at all levels: individual, project, and organization. This book describes 14 principles that can guide the management priorities, individual behaviors, and technical practices that characterize a software development organization.

With this book, I hope to reach first-line software managers, project leaders, and practitioners who wish to drive progress toward an improved, quality-oriented culture. My goals are to provide practical ideas for immediately improving the way a team performs, and to show that continuous software process improvement is both possible and worthwhile. Dozens of "Culture Builder" and "Culture Killer" tips help software managers steer their organizations to higher levels of quality, customer satisfaction, and quality of work life.

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Summary: A must read for everyone in the software industry!
Review: A practical guideline for building strong and successful software development methodologies.

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Summary: A guide to creating a healthy software organization
Review: Karl Wieger's book is exceptional in that is provides you with ideas to improve the culture of the software department. It provides culture builders, as well as those nasty culture killers. It leaves you waiting for Monday morning to use at least one of the practices you have read. This is a MUST READ book for all software managers and practitioners.

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Summary: A common-sense approach to software process improvement.
Review: The book contains a common-sense approach to software process improvement strategies for most organizations to follow. Wiegers takes the mystique out of the Software Engineering Institute's CMM and offers the CMM as one way of many to accomplish process improvement. He balances technology and process-focus against real-world people issues. Must reading for anyone involved in a Software Engineering Process Group or for senior managers trying to figure out what all this stuff is about. Text is well illustrated by case studies and examples from the author's experience at Kodak

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Summary: A needed dose of software development sanity.
Review: This is a great overview of all the elements of a successful software project - from project planning to system design on up to testing and project postmortem. Many of the topics are covered too lightly to allow a practitioner to use all of Wieger's advice right out of the gate. But that's fine - the book is meant to be a handbook of great ideas from which practitioners should choose, study and implement. Pay particular attention to the discussion on determing project drivers and constraints during the project planning phase - an area usually breezed over, with devastating consequences.

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Summary: Essential especially for small IS shops
Review: Wiegers' experience in a relatively small group at Kodak and his practical approach embodied in this book provide sound and strong encouragement for anybody to improve their software processes. There may be no silver bullet, but this book comes awfully close.

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Summary: Tactical Approach to Software Quality & Process Improvement!
Review: Written in a remarkably clear style, Creating a Software Engineering Culture presents a comprehensive approach to improving the quality and effectiveness of the software development process.

In twenty chapters spread over six parts, Wiegers promotes the tactical changes required to support process improvement and high-quality software development. Throughout the text, Wiegers identifies scores of culture builders and culture killers, and he offers a wealth of references to resources for the software engineer, including seminars, conferences, publications, videos, and on-line information.

With case studies on process improvement and software metrics programs and an entire Part on action planning (called "What to Do on Monday"), this practical book guides the reader in applying the concepts to real life.

Topics include: software culture concepts, team behaviors, the five dimensions of a software project, recognizing achievements, optimizing customer involvement, the project champion model, tools for sharing the vision, requirements traceability matrices, the capability maturity model, action planning, testing, inspections, metrics-based project estimation, the cost of quality, and much more!