Building Maintainable Software, Java Edition

Have you ever felt frustrated working with someone else's code? Difficult-to-maintain source code is a big problem in software development today, leading to costly delays and defects. Be part of the solution. With this practical book, you'll learn 10 easy-to-follow guidelines for delivering software that's easy to maintain and adapt. These guidelines have been derived from analyzing hundreds of real-world systems. Written by consultants from the Software Improvement Group (SIG), this book provides clear and concise explanations, with advice for turning the guidelines into practice. Examples are written in Java, but this guide is equally useful for developers working in other programming languages. 10 Coding Guidelines - Write short units of code: limit the length of methods and constructors - Write simple units of code: limit the number of branch points per method - Write code once, rather than risk copying buggy code - Keep unit interfaces small by extracting parameters into objects - Separate concerns to avoid building large classes - Couple architecture components loosely - Balance the number and size of top-level components in your code - Keep your codebase as small as possible - Automate tests for your codebase - Write clean code, avoiding "code smells" that indicate deeper problems Why you should read this book Taken in isolation, the guidelines presented in this book are well-known. In fact, many well-known tools for code analysis check a number of the guidelines presented here. The following three characteristics set this book apart from other books on software development: We have selected the ten most important guidelines from experience. We teach how to comply with these ten guidelines. We present statistics and examples from real-world systems. This book is part our Training on Software Maintainability - and subsequent Certification on Quality Software Development program. For more information about this program, please contact training@sig.eu.