Ship it

Ship It! A practical guide to successful software projects by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr.

Choose your habits

Stay in the sandbox (develop in isolation from other developers)

If you need it, check it in

Script builds on day one

Any machine can be a build machine

Build continuously

Test continuously

Avoid collective memory loss (use issue tracking, wiki)

Exercise your product - automate your tests

Use a common, flexible test harness

Use the best tools for the job

Use open formats to integrate tools

Keep critical path technologies familiar

Work to The List

Let a tech lead

Use daily meetings for frequent course corrections

It’s okay to say “later”

Always review all code

The goal is software, not compliance

Architect as a group

If production uses it, you should too

Solve the hardest problems first

An encapsulated architecture is a scalable architecture

You can steer a boat unless its moving

Don’t change legacy code until you can test it

Use test driven refactoring to clean up untestable code

Mock client tests do the most with the least

Continuously test changing code

It has to work for everyone

Integrate often, and build and test continuously

Deliver live demos early and often

Publicize what you’re doing and why

Face time builds teamwork

Only fix what needs fixing

Disruptive “best practices” aren’t

Innovate from the bottom up

Show, don’t just tell

Cultivate management buy-in

Test where the bugs are

The list is a living document. Change is life

It is’s not on The List, it’s not part of the project

Always give feedback first.