pragmaticprogrammer.txt

Care About Your Craft: Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?
Think! About Your Work: Turn off the autopilot and take control. Constantly critique and appraise your work.
Provide Options, Don't Make Lame Excuses: Instead of excuses, provide options. Don't say it can't be done; explain what can be done.
Don't Live with Broken Windows: Fix bad designs, wrong decisions, and poor code when you see them.
Be a Catalyst for Change: You can't force change on people. Instead, show them how the future might be and help them participate in creating it.
Remember the Big Picture: Don't get so engrossed in the details that you forget to check what's happening around you.
Make Quality a Requirements Issue: Involve your users in determining the project's real quality requirements.
Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio: Make learning a habit.
Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear: Don't be swayed by vendors, media hype, or dogma. Analyze information in terms of you and your project.
It's Both What You Say and the Way You Say It: There's no point in having great ideas if you don't communicate them effectively.
DRY – Don't Repeat Yourself: Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
Make It Easy to Reuse: If it's easy to reuse, people will. Create an environment that supports reuse.
Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things: Design components that are self-contained. independent, and have a single, well-defined purpose.
There Are No Final Decisions: No decision is cast in stone. Instead, consider each as being written in the sand at the beach, and plan for change.
Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target: Tracer bullets let you home in on your target by trying things and seeing how close they land.
Prototype to Learn: Prototyping is a learning experience. Its value lies not in the code you produce, but in the lessons you learn.
Program Close to the Problem Domain: Design and code in your user's language.
Estimate to Avoid Surprises: Estimate before you start. You'll spot potential problems up front.
Iterate the Schedule with the Code: Use experience you gain as you implement to refine the project time scales.
Keep Knowledge in Plain Text: Plain text won't become obsolete. It helps leverage your work and simplifies debugging and testing.
Use the Power of Command Shells: Use the shell when graphical user interfaces don't cut it.
Use a Single Editor Well: The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.
Always Use Source Code Control: Source code control is a time machine for your work – you can go back.
Fix the Problem, Not the Blame: It doesn't really matter whether the bug is your fault or someone else's – it is still your problem, and it still needs to be fixed.
Don't Panic When Debugging: Take a deep breath and THINK! about what could be causing the bug.
"select" Isn't Broken: It is rare to find a bug in the OS or the compiler, or even a third-party product or library. The bug is most likely in the application.
Don't Assume It – Prove It: Prove your assumptions in the actual environment – with real data and boundary conditions.
Learn a Text Manipulation Language: You spend a large part of each day working with text. Why not have the computer do some of it for you?
Write Code That Writes Code: Code generators increase your productivity and help avoid duplication.
You Can't Write Perfect Software: Software can't be perfect. Protect your code and users from the inevitable errors.
Design with Contracts: Use contracts to document and verify that code does no more and no less than it claims to do.
Crash Early: A dead program normally does a lot less damage than a crippled one.
Use Assertions to Prevent the Impossible: Assertions validate your assumptions. Use them to protect your code from an uncertain world.
Use Exceptions for Exceptional Problems: Exceptions can suffer from all the readability and maintainability problems of classic spaghetti code. Reserve exceptions for exceptional things.
Finish What You Start: Where possible, the routine or object that allocates a resource should be responsible for deallocating it.
Minimize Coupling Between Modules: Avoid coupling by writing "shy" code and applying the Law of Demeter.
Configure, Don't Integrate: Implement technology choices for an application as configuration options, not through integration or engineering.
Put Abstractions in Code, Details in Metadata: Program for the general case, and put the specifics outside the compiled code base.
Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency: Exploit concurrency in your user's workflow.
Design Using Services: Design in terms of services – independent, concurrent objects behind well-defined, consistent interfaces.
Always Design for Concurrency: Allow for concurrency, and you'll design cleaner interfaces with fewer assumptions.
Separate Views from Models: Gain flexibility at low cost by designing your application in terms of models and views.
Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow: Use blackboards to coordinate disparate facts and agents, while maintaining independence and isolation among participants.
Don't Program by Coincidence: Rely only on reliable things. Beware of accidental complexity, and don't confuse a happy coincidence with a purposeful plan.
Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms: Get a feel for how long things are likely to take before you write code.
Test Your Estimates: Mathematical analysis of algorithms doesn't tell you everything. Try timing your code in its target environment.
Refactor Early, Refactor Often: Just as you might weed and rearrange a garden, rewrite, rework, and re-architect code when it needs it. Fix the root of the problem.
Design to Test: Start thinking about testing before you write a line of code.
Test Your Software, or Your Users Will: Test ruthlessly. Don't make your users find bugs for you.
Don't Use Wizard Code You Don't Understand: Wizards can generate reams of code. Make sure you understand all of it before you incorporate it into your project.
Don't Gather Requirements – Dig for Them: Requirements rarely lie on the surface. They're buried deep beneath layers of assumptions, misconceptions, and politics.
Workwith a User to Think Like a User: It's the best way to gain insight into how the system will really be used.
Abstractions Live Longer than Details: Invest in the abstraction, not the implementation. Abstractions can survive the barrage of changes from different implementations and new technologies.
Use a Project Glossary: Create and maintain a single source of all the specific terms and vocabulary for a project.
Don't Think Outside the Box – Find the Box: When faced with an impossible problem, identify the real constraints. Ask yourself: "Does it have to be done this way? Does it have to be done at all?"
Start When You're Ready.: You've been building experience all your life. Don't ignore niggling doubts.
Some Things Are Better Done than Described: Don't fall into the specification spiral – at some point you need to start coding.
Don't Be a Slave to Formal Methods.: Don't blindly adopt any technique without putting it into the context of your development practices and capabilities.
Costly Tools Don't Produce Better Designs: Beware of vendor hype, industry dogma, and the aura of the price tag. Judge tools on their merits.
Organize Teams Around Functionality: Don't separate designers from coders, testers from data modelers. Build teams the way you build code.
Don't Use Manual Procedures: A shell script or batch file will execute the same instructions, in the same order, time after time.
Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically: Tests that run with every build are much more effective than test plans that sit on a shelf.
Coding Ain't Done 'Til All the Tests Run: 'Nuff said.
Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing: Introduce bugs on purpose in a separate copy of the source to verify that testing will catch them.
Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage: Identify and test significant program states. Just testing lines of code isn't enough.
Find Bugs Once: Once a human tester finds a bug, it should be the last time a human tester finds that bug. Automatic tests should check for it from then on.
English is Just a Programming Language: Write documents as you would write code: honor the DRY principle, use metadata, MVC, automatic generation, and so on.
Build Documentation In, Don't Bolt It On: Documentation created separately from code is less likely to be correct and up to date.
Gently Exceed Your Users' Expectations: Come to understand your users' expectations, then deliver just that little bit more.
Sign Your Work: Craftsmen of an earlier age were proud to sign their work. You should be, too.