Dare to Be Excellent: Case Studies of Software Engineering Practices That Work

By Alka Jarvis

No matter what anyone says, you can build extraordinarily high-quality software - and this book shows you exactly how the world's best software development organizations are doing it.KEY TOPICS: The best practices described in this book cover the entire lifecycle. Each chapter describes a real-world problem, and how it was identified, addressed and fixed by one of the world's best software development organizations. Coverage includes project planning, metrics, inspections, software reliability; unit, system and acceptance testing; design and construction, release control, post-implementation reviews and more.MARKET: Anyone involved in software development, including developers, testers and project managers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0130811564
• ISBN13: 9780130811561
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great Real Life examples

No more theories! This book gives ten examples of real-life case studies. The comapnies participating are from financial industry to high-tech. Software Quality is no longer a mystery. The book and the case studies shows that with discipline, everything is possible.

Dare to be Execellent

Of the 10 case studies in the book all were at least interesting and some were very useful. They are focused on commerical and product development processes, so the one reviewer that was looking for embedded and realtime SQA would naturally be disapointed. Not all the companies presented are house hold words, by they are all non-trivial examples of process improvements in the SQA domain. Each case study is structured in the same manner, with both technical and non-techncial aspects of the SQA problem described in moderate detail. I'm sure each companies PR department reviewed the materials, but they are still insigthful. Several of the SQA process are based on the SEI CMM paradigm, so many of the diagrams look familar. Taken as a whole this book should be mandatory reading for any SQA or software development manager. Much of the material could be put to direct use as is. Several of the products are finacial or back office offerings, so they may not be of interest to the lastest intrnet generation. However for those of us tasked with building the boring database transaction processing applications, this book is a welcome addition. I would recommend this book as source material for anyone engaged in Software Process Improvement.

Outstanding example of the fact that SE Principles work

The book is an excellent compilation of companies for whom the basic software engineering strategies work. We need more "how to" books like this.