Applying the Best Practices Requires Persistence

We know, it is a bit of a downer. The best practices in this book will only work for disciplined and persistent teams. Persistence requires discipline and a belief that what you are doing is right. Discipline is not about being in the office at the same time every day or having a clean desk. It is about working consistently, standing your ground, and being able to say “for this issue we will not make an exception.”

Persistence also implies patience. It takes time to master best practices and that will require an investment in time.

One Practice at a Time

We have presented our ten best practices in an order that reflects the typical order in which you want to accomplish them. For instance, Continuous Integration (Chapter 7) cannot possibly be effective without version control (Chapter 4) and to benefit fully from it, requires automated testing (Chapter 6). Of course, often they appear together. For example, when defining the DoD (Chapter 3), this is part of documentation (Chapter 11). In fact, all best practices in this book are standards themselves (Chapter 9).

It is more effective to implement one best practice in a complete and dependable way, instead of doing multiple ones partially. Partial implementation of best practices does not demonstrate their full benefits and that may be discouraging: it seems like you are investing all the time, and not reaping the advertised benefits.

Avoid the Metric Pitfalls

We know, the metric pitfalls (“Motivation”) are hard to avoid and their effects may not be visible immediately. Using the Goal-Question-Metric approach in a rigorous manner (Chapter 2) helps to define the right metrics for your purposes. Of particular interest are metrics that provide “perverse” incentives (that is, the opposite of what you are trying to achieve), leading your team to treat or misinterpret metrics in a manner that is not helping achieve the team goals. To find out whether this is the case, you will need to able to discuss this openly with the team. This may lead you to change or remove metrics. After all, if the metrics do not help you, change them!

What Is Next?

We hope that this book is helping you to improve the quality of your software, by applying the mentioned best practices. And that you have found or will find proper metrics to help you to confidently follow progress.

If you want to hone your individual coding skills, we refer you to our companion book Building Maintainable Software: Ten Guidelines for Future-Proof Code. For other process-related issues, consult the books listed in “Related Books”.