Software quality matters. Software runs our banking operations, air traffic control, stock markets, global navigation, personal information privacy, and many other facets of our lives. Good software helps all of these things run smoothly; bad software has the potential to hurt or even kill people.

But what, exactly, distinguishes good software from bad software? Expert programmers know good software when they see it, and they are likely to produce it themselves. What do they see in the better software that makes it better? And how do they write it? Are there universal principles of good software design, that all high-quality examples share, and which are absent from poor software? If so, what are these principles?

The book addresses these questions and is written for anyone in the computer field or related areas: programmers, managers, investors, engineers, scientists. It is also useful as a supplementary text in a college course on software engineering.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Beautiful Software

2. The Missing Theory of Refactoring

3. All Source Code Should Be Open

4. Is Software Patentable?

5. A Software Schedule Ain't Nothin' but a Piece of Paper

6. It's Not About Lines of Code

7. Why Software Really Fails, and What to Do About It

8. What the Linux Community Needs To Grok

9. Do Open Source Projects Manage Themselves?

10. Why Software Engineering Matters

11. Software Engineering Is More than Computer Science

12. A Quagmire in the Tar Pit

13. Hey, Programmers! We Got No Theory!