Good day everyone,

please i'd like to know the five priciples and practices that drive software development...thank you...please you can also mail me walataza@yahoo.com

regards

Hello,

OK, I'll byte. Where did you get the idea there were five principles and practices?

Wal 

After reading about Google's 12 top software development  practices  earlier this week, I set myself the goal of listing the 10 software development practices that have most helped me in my job of managing delivery of software products with ~1M lines of C/C++ code. After reading your post I thought about which of these practices were not critical in my line of work and could only reduce my list to 9. I would guess that other practices would be more important in other types of software development.

 Five practices seems too few to me. Smarter people may disagree.

-Peter

1. Assemble the best team you can afford and keep them. 
2. Be data driven. Measure progress with tests. Keep a diary with 1 day to 1 week granularity.
3. Be balanced. Don't rely on any one software engineering practice. e.g for quality control use Code review + Unit tests + Automated System tests + Human QA.
4. Expect the unexpected. Maintain a Top 10 risk list . Confront risk by moving the riskiest items in project to the start of the schedule.
5. Work in short development cycles with real-world success criteria. Otherwise your project and its schedule are at risk of loosing touch with reality.
6. Eat your own dogfood. Use the product you are developing.
7. When you have enough information to act then act. Time is precious in software development. Never waste it.
8. Have a common tool set and common practices for the whole development group and make these tools easy to deploy. Aim for near-zero (say 5 minutes) tool setup time per day. 
9. Use source code control. 

Peter,

That sounds close to the eight software engineering principles we talk about in our 10x Software Engineering class.

1. Avoid minus-x engineering (classic mistakes)
2. Seek ground truth
3. Base decisions on data
4. Minimize unintentional rework
5. Tailor the solution to the problem
6. Attack uncertainty
7. Set direction
8. Grow capability

We suggest that there are many strategies or practices that you can use to support these principles. Your set sounds right on track.

Here is a good article on 9 steps to a hassle free and effective software development project:

http://www.executivebrief.com/article/9-steps-to-a-hassle-free-and-effective-software-development-project/