An empirical and not a defined process

Software development is generally an empirical process. The empirical process control model is one that imposes control over process through inspection and adaptation. A defined process documents all of the steps to arrive at a known result. Through the use of a defined process to detail ways of developing a software and defining processes through practices, we can offload much of the burden of inspection and adaptation in software development. But any unknown or undiscovered areas of software development will require empirical process control. As we become more skilled in our understanding of many practices, much of the thought that goes into developing software can also be concentrated on the value of the solution we're trying to implement.

At lower-levels, we can't really define the process by which we will implement most software in its entirety. We try to impose a defined process on a software with things like the software development life cycle (SDLC), and define that there are several phases to writing software such as: inception, analysis, architecture, design, development, test, delivery, operations, maintenance, and so on. In fact there have been processes defined throughout the history of software development to try and turn what is generally an empirical process into a defined process, or at least taking what is known of the process and making it defined. Unfortunately, these defined processes hide the fact that much of the details of producing software are empirical.

The practices in this book do not try to distract from the fact that most software projects are empirical and try to impose processes. In a way, practices are a way of making more of the software development process defined rather than empirical. This book tries to define a way to reach commonly required goals of many software development projects. The goals shared amongst many software development projects cease to become value-added to that particular project, they become commodities. Commodities are important to the delivery and health of the software, but are neither unique to the project, nor require much, if any, research. Research, into areas of a project that don't add value obviously doesn't provide the same return on investment. If we can implement one of these commodities with little or no research then the project is better for it. Better because it can move on to spending time on the value that the project is intending to provide.

The quintessential example in so many contexts is logging. Microsoft Word is not an application, library, or framework that provides logging, but Word may perform its own logging in order to debug, gauge health, aid support, gather metrics, and so on. All of which help Word satisfy existing and future customers. But the software developers on the Word team do not need to discover any particular logging implementation because they are trying to produce a word processing product.

Cross-cutting concerns

Based on what you have just read, and if you look closely at practices, you'll notice that the goal of each practice is a goal shared by many software teams or products. This book obviously does not try to detail how to write a word processor or how to write a web browser. However, it does detail certain practices that would aid in the development of almost all software: cross-cutting concerns. A cross-cutting concern is a task that needs to be performed by more than one piece of software, more than one module in your software, or more than one class in your module. It is said that each class/module/software has concerns over and above what is deemed to be its responsibility.

An invoicing module has the responsibility of tracking line items, prices, discounts, customer, applying taxes, and so on. But in many aspects it needs to take on more than it is responsible for. An invoicing module may need to log the actions it performs, it may need to perform data caching, it may need to provide health monitoring, and so on. None of these things are really what the software does, but they help the software do what it does in a more efficient and effective way.

Focus on the value

In many of the earlier paragraphs one thing should shine through: practices are a means by which we can take what isn't truly our "value proposition" in the software solution we're trying to implement (such as infrastructure), and concentrate our efforts on the value we want to provide. This gets our value out sooner and theoretically lets us spend more time on ensuring quality of that value.

As software developers move from journeymen to craftsmen or masters, much of what we gain in skill is through learning practices that allow us to focus on a solution's value. Craftsmen and masters need to communicate practices as well as mentor journeymen in a better way if our industry is going to thrive and improve.