Reading a great book this morning, I stumbled upon the concept of code construction as a distinct activity in a software development project. If you’re involved in a lot of development projects like me, you probably spend some time during your projects thinking of ways to describe what you’re doing. Having a great vocabulary on your specific trade can go a long way to making communication clearer and easier.
Steve McConnell describes code construction this way in the book I was reading, Code Complete
:
construction is mostly coding and debugging but also involves detailed design, construction planning, unit testing, integration, integration testing, and other activities.
When you think about it, that’s an awful lot of pieces to read about, practice and become expert on. No wonder I find this such a unique reference to have on my shelf. So many other books are great on particular technology or language. Few that I’ve found concentrate on programming and what goes along with it in a generic way that can benefit you no matter whether you are writing code for SharePoint in C# or for the iPhone in Objective C.
If you want to read more about the construction part of software development, I highly recommend picking up this book. Project management, requirements, design and testing are all important parts of software development. However, without great construction none of the other pieces really matter anyway, do they?
My dog-eared copy of the original CC (ISBN 1-55615-484-4) has been a staple item on my desk since it came out around ’93 and I think should be required reading for any dev. CC2 improves further on the concepts. Enjoy!!
Mark Freeman
twitter: @SPS2010
Mark,
Thanks so much for reading and sharing your experience. I wish I could say I had been referencing it since ’93 but for me it’s been more like 2003. I only recently upgraded to the second version.
-Tom
Way cooler than saying ‘programming’ or ‘engineering’ – more of a chance for those not in the trade to understand as well.
Will have to check out that book. Thanks for sharing.
@Like it – thanks for reading! I agree code construction has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?
The ‘Like it’ was from Chad S – who not used to being anonymous, which is also liked.
-Chad
@Chad S – you are a funny guy! I’m glad to hear SPS VB went well from reading your blog. I just renamed the Title field to Name and the Body field to Comment. Still playing around with customizing this out of the box SharePoint 2010 Blog.