Foreword

For almost ten years I’ve been encouraging Sam Guckenheimer to write a book about software engineering. “Oh no, I’m not ready,” was the invariable reply.

With the release of Visual Studio Team System, Sam no longer had an excuse: he really had to explain his ideas about software engineering to help people make sense of the product that embodies them. It’s great to see that turn into a book that puts equal weight on practicum and theory, rather than a book-length product advertisement or a vague discussion of the philosophy of software engineering. I like the concrete examples here: they make the concepts come alive.

One key concept in this book is that of value-up processes. Sam believes that we are facing a huge paradigm shift in the way we approach software, which rings true. The work-down paradigm has led to a number of problems with the software development process and ultimately to a high rate of failed projects. Whether the value-up paradigm will solve the problems without creating new ones, of course, remains to be seen.

In the past, the practice of software metrics has not kept up with its potential, largely because of the high cost of collecting data. As Sam explains in this book, instrumenting daily activities to allow painless data collection opens up a new set of opportunities for meaningful metrics. Sam hasn’t stopped there; he has applied some of the more interesting techniques from lean project management to demonstrate how to troubleshoot software projects on a daily basis. That also enables the reliable application of value-up processes.

For almost a decade, a number of ideas have percolated in the various areas of software engineering: in programming, user experience, testing, and architecture. Sam has pulled the best of these together to apply across the entire software lifecycle.

I trust that you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

Ivar Jacobson, Ph.D.
Ivar Jacobson Consulting LLC