Software Process Dynamics

Citation

Howard, W.R. (2008), "Software Process Dynamics", Kybernetes, Vol. 37 No. 7, pp. 1070-1071. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920810884432

Software development is one of the most demanding of present‐day processes, and is one that needs to be very carefully planned and executed. This is a book that has been designed to help its readers and to explain in clear terms the dynamics of such development. It comes when our systems are overburdened by poorly conceived software packages often designed by well‐meaning amateurs. The professional software engineers striver to assess and to optimise their own strategies and are ready to read the literature to find ways to improve them. This text presents methods by which the process can be improved and introduces some of the best practices whilst describing and summarising relevant research with ample examples of its application.

It has the novelty of making available in parallel, a web site which allows readers to experience these developing techniques in their own way. The web site, we are promised, will be suitably updated in the future to take account of new processes and their methodology and their importance.

It also makes the point that software development has a broader perspective and guides readers in the techniques which integrate these into organisational processes.

It is a comprehensive text and can only be recommended to those involved in cybernetics, systems and the management sciences who are engaged in software generation, although others will be interested in the problems involved in the dynamics of software development. The practical “hands‐on” facility using the allied web site will prove attractive and particular chapters can be chosen by readers who wish to learn the particular associated skills.

Cyberneticians will be particularly interested in the use of modelling in software process dynamics. This is a text that reviews the software process of modelling with system dynamics and clearly describes how software developers have used the principles to better their processes. In doing so, the author also describes and discusses the process of modelling in this context with reference to calibration of models to software metrics data. The author also encourages software engineers to develop other aspects of the process by taking a wider view of software development in order to have an “indepth” understanding of what constitutes the process. By taking both a technical and a social approach Raymond Madachy, the author, stimulates the readers interest and makes his book of over 600 pages a very worthwhile title.