Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code

In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues.

Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success.

Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment.

• Clarify what you're trying to accomplish
• Choose your tools based on sensible criteria
• Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress
• Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code"
• Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism
• Stay in control as systems grow more complex
• Achieve rigor without too much rigidity
• Learn from history and experience
• Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones

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David Farley, founder and consultant for Continuous Delivery Ltd., has been a programmer, software engineer, and systems architect since the early days of modern computing. He has shaped ground-breaking approaches that have transformed how developers and teams work. With Jez Humble, Farley coauthored the best-seller Continuous Delivery. As Head of Software Development for the London Multi Asset Exchange (LMAX), he built one of the world's fastest financial exchanges. One of the earliest adopters of agile techniques employing iterative development, continuous integration, and high levels of automated testing, he also coauthored the Reactive Manifesto. Dave also runs the popular and highly successful "Continuous Delivery" YouTube channel.