Chapter 1. Introduction

Projects have Environments in which People produce Products.

"Pithy, but painful," was a friend's wry reply when I asked his opinion of the above epigraph as a summary for this book. At a very high level, it really does describe the creation of software. The key word is environments, which in this book refers to all the tools used to produce software and how they are used, but not the details of how the software is written, or even what language the software is written in. For this book, an environment includes the software configuration management (SCM) tools, build tools, testing and bug tracking tools, and the release and maintenance processes. All these areas are covered in subsequent chapters of this book.

This chapter begins with an overview of how a software product is typically created. If you are involved in this process from day to day, you will probably be familiar with most of the steps. The amount of work in each step is different for different projects, groups of people, or companies, but all the steps appear in some guise. This chapter also briefly describes the difference between open and closed software.

The chapter then continues with some uncomfortable software development mistakes that most developers have stumbled across; avoiding these costly mistakes justifies reading the rest of this book.