Practitioners Books

The Practitioner's Guide is a career assessment tool and the major reference book for Holland Codes and occupations.

Holland Career Materials: A Practitioner's Guide is a book that provides practical applications for the Holland Code Career Model. The Holland Career Materials: A Practitioner's Guide discusses -

* Introduction to Holland RIASEC Model
* Relationship to other career theories, e.g. Cognitive Information Processing (CIP)
* Detailed descriptions, comparisons, and uses of the four SDS forms (R,E, CP, and CE)
* Other Holland Code career guidance materials

As a teacher coming into the area for the first time, I found this absolutely invaluable. A must-buy

This collection of papers on software change impact analysis covers both practice and theory. The book starts with an introduction to change impact analysis. This intro covers terms, theories and practices that have emerged and are accepted among most researchers and practitioners, and provides a basic discussion of traceability and impact analysis.

Chapter 1 is titled Nature of Impact Analysis and contains A Process Model for Software Maintenance, Impact Analysis-Towards A Framework for Comparison, and The Year 2000 Problem: Impact, Strategies, and Tools. Although the last paper is obviously out of date, some of the techniques are worth examining, especially since a good amount of the Y2K problem required impact and risk analysis.

State of the Practice is the topic of chapter 2, and contains the following papers: An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem, Software Change Impact Analysis for Design Evolution and Configuration Management Survey. These three papers are a combination of practice and theory.

The material in Chapter 3, Automated Support for Impact Analysis, is spotty. Some is out of date in my opinion, while other papers are as fresh today as when the book was published. Papers in this chapter are: The Integrated CASE Manifesto, A Practical Software Maintenance Environment, Intelligent Assistance for Software Development and Maintenance and Maintenance Support for Object-Oriented Programs (the last is excellent!). Chapter 4 contains the most practical material in the collection. The topic title is Dependency-Analysis Approaches, and the papers are: Using Dependence Analysis to Support the Software Maintenance Process, Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs, Data Dependency Graphs for Ada Programs, Data Flow Analysis and its Application to Software Maintenance and Change Impact Identification in Object Oriented Software Maintenance.

Papers in Chapter 5 (Traceability Approaches) are also mostly practical, but many are out of date or contain information that was a good idea at the time, but seem quaint by today's standards. Paper topics are: A Hypertext System to Manage Software Life-Cycle Documents (very much ahead of its time, but woefully out of date now), A Software Documentation Support Environment-Its Definition, Traceability Based on Design Decisions (this is *must reading* in my opinion) and A Process for Consolidating and Reusing Design Knowledge. Chapter 6's papers address Impact Representation. While many were written a decade ago all of them are interesting and include ideas that are as valid today. Topics are: The Prism Model of Changes, A Unified Interprocedural Program Representation for a Maintenance Environment, A Formal Model of Program Dependencies and Its Implications for Software Testing, Debugging, and Maintenance and A Graph Model for Software Evolution.

Chapter 7 is devoted to Impact-Determination Techniques and contains interesting papers that are more theoretical than practical in my opinion. Topics are: An Early Impact Analysis Technique for Software Maintenance, Using Program Slicing in Software Maintenance, Efficient Algorithms for the Instantiated Transitive Closure Queries, and Approximate Reasoning About the Semantic Effects of Program Changes. Chapter 8 is a synopsis of material in the preceding chapters, with and commentary and observations about impact analysis as a discipline.

Overall, this book represents a substantial cross section of the body of knowledge devoted to software change impact analysis. Some strengths include the fact that this collection of papers makes the body of knowledge available in one book, and the focus of the papers on software engineering aspects of change and maintenance, and how to manage impact to complex applications. A key weakness is that some of the papers are over 10 years old. However, despite the age of some of the papers many are surprisingly applicable to maintenance challenges faced by practitioners today.

This book contains 170 information-packed pages that describe a comprehensive and effective approach to managing software development risks.

The approach is based on a just-in-time (JIT) strategy. Key elements of this strategy include (1) strategic planning and operational planning, the former is focused on product-line based software and makes a distinction between the software under development being the product itself or a part of the product, and the latter is focused on project planning and controls; (2) early risk identification, and (3) parallel development. When this book was first published parallel development was a complex goal; however, with component-based development strategies the approach is ideal. Perhaps the author was ahead of his time.

Some of the best chapters in this book are: Chapter 4 - provides excellent insights and advice on managing the strategic and operational elements of the JIT strategy, Chapter 5 - comprehensive list of software risk elements and Chapter 7 - another comprehensive list that covers risk metrics.

Chapter 8 describes the JIT method as it applies to each phase in the software development life cycle. This chapter contains valuable tables that can be used as checklists in your own project, and is full of useful information that can be applied to project risk management regardless of whether or not you implement the JIT approach described in this book. Chapter 9 shows how to apply the JIT approach to a project. This chapter is short is really a brief summary of the software engineering risk model (SERIM) from which the JIT approach was derived. Chapter 10 is a collection of JIT examples that can easily be recast into patterns. I especially like the way these examples clarify the information in preceding nine chapters. I recommend that you refer to this chapter as you read through the book because there will almost certainly be an example that will illustrate any fuzzy areas.

This is one of my favorite books on risk management in general and software risk management in particular. The information and approach are not limited to software engineering, although the book was obviously written for that technical domain. I have borrowed techniques from this book and have successfully applied them in other kinds of projects, as I am sure you will. I give it 5 stars and a strong recommendation.

Software Standards is a developing field for most companies. It is a jungle out there, and the number of books about the subject is huge and growing. This book attempts (and succeeds in my humble opinion) to show a clear path for those who seek to manage the chaos of software engineering. However, I also recommend getting the IEEE book as reference, ISBN 1-55937-898-0, although this book includes most of what you'll need.

With exceptions that I've noted below this is an in-depth examination of standards, initiatives and methods for software process improvement (SPI) and software process assessment (SPA).

The book is divided into twelve chapters, each of which contains two or more papers written by top experts in the field, including Mark Paulk (of CMM fame), Watts S. Humphrey (creator of PSP and TSP, and prolific author of software engineering process papers), Robert B. Grady (author of three standard references on metrics), and others who key players, but are not as widely known outside of the SPI and SPA community.

Chapter 1 covers software process assessment with an article by Paulk that surveys the more common models for SPI and SPA, and a reprint of Sarah Sheard's excellent article from CrossTalk Magazine titled "The Frameworks Quagmire". Chapter 2 contains three articles on the SW-CMM, which seems to be the centerpiece of this book. Chapter 3, "Other Approaches to Software Process Assessment" contains four articles that add balance by covering non-CMM approaches that are in common use, especially in Europe (Bootstrap). I especially liked the article by David N. Card titled "Sorting out Six Sigma and the CMM", which combines two hot topics. One of the exceptions that I cited at the beginning of this review is the article on Trillium, which in my opinion has been superseded by TL 9000 in the telecommunications industry.

The three articles in Chapter 4 (Software Process Improvement: How To Do It) address common concerns and barriers to any SPI initiative, and each add well thought out ideas, especially Sandra McGill's "Overcoming Resistance to Standard Processes, or, Herding Cats", and William Florac's "Statistically Managing the Software Process".

Watts Humphrey's Personal and Team Software Processes, and CMMI are the key topics in Chapter 5, which covers developments inspired by the SW-CMM. All of Chapter 6's Software Product Evaluation articles were my favorites from among the collection in this book, and I particularly liked Jørgen Bøegh's "Quality Evaluation of Software Products" and Geoff Dromey's "A Model for Software Product Quality" because they go to the heart of key issues in both product line engineering challenges and user acceptance testing.

Chapter 7, ISO 9000 Series and TickIT, is the second exception that I previously noted. Much has changed in ISO 9000 with the 2000 standard, which renders this entire chapter moot in my opinion. I also thought the five articles in Chapter 8, The SPICE Project, would have been a better fit in Chapter 3. The same goes for Chapter 9, Experiences of Software Process Assessment, which is nearly an extension of Chapter 8, and is closely related to Chapter 3.

Two other favorite chapters are 10 (Software Process Improvement for Small Organizations) and 11 (Benefits of Software Process Improvement). Chapter 10's three articles dispell any notion that SPI is only feasible for large organizations, and the three articles in Chapter 11 focus on the benefits of SPI, especially Herb Krasner's article titled "Accumulating the Body of Evidence for the Payoff of Software Process Improvement". I also liked the final chapter, which covers software processes in general, including an excellent article on modeling. I felt that this chapter should have been at the beginning of the book instead of the end.

Overall, this is a book for those of us who are nearly religious about SPI; but is not a good introductory text. It's main value will be to IT consultants who specialize in either SPI or SPA (or both), and who need to be familiar with the mainstream standards and approaches.

This is a very good book, covering a breadthof topics for software qa people of all levelsand all ranges of experience. Ernest has taken the time to catalog many successful methods, tips, techniques, and arguments.

This book is a collection of 14 essays on software quality and testing that has been compiled and edited by Dr. Hoang Pham. The material is more suited for academic, R&D and advanced software quality assurance professionals, and is highly technical in nature. Dr. Pham is one of the top names in software reliability and quality. His credentials as author, contributor or editor of over 50 articles and 18 books, and his forward-thinking research ensures that the essays in this book represents solid material. Although this compilation of essays was published in 1995 they are still applicable and are an excellent source of material for researchers and advanced practitioners.

The essays are divided among two main topics: (1) software reliability and (2) theoretical testing and assurance techniques.

Essay titles that focus on reliability are: Realistic Assumptions for Software Reliability Models, Predicting Software Development Errors Using Software Complexity Metrics, The Infeasibility of Quantifying the Reliability of Life-Critical Real-Time Software, Reliability Analysis of Large Software Systems: Defect Data Modeling, A Micro Software Reliability Model for Prediction and Test Apportionment, and Optimization Models for Selection of Programs Considering Cost & Reliability.

The essays that focus on testing and assurance techniques are: Software Reliability Measurement in Imperfect Debugging Environment and its Application, Are We Testing for True Reliability?, Safety Arguments, Software and System Reliability, Application of Software Reliability Modeling to Product Quality and Test Process, Some New Models of Software Testing with Performance Comparisons, Software Fault Content and Reliability Estimations for Telecommunication Systems, Adapting, Correcting, and Perfecting Software Estimates: A Maintenance Metaphor, and Enhanced Availability of Transaction Oriented Systems using Failure Tests.

Each essay is an in-depth monograph on its topic. The essays that I personally thought were highlights of this book were Predicting Software Development Errors Using Software Complexity Metrics, Adapting, Correcting, and Perfecting Software Estimates: A Maintenance Metaphor, and Enhanced Availability of Transaction Oriented Systems using Failure Tests. From each of these I learned some interesting techniques that were directly applicable to applications and service delivery from QA and support points of view that could be incorporated into real-life processes.

Do not let the age of this book deter you - it's as applicable to reliability and quality challenges we face in 2001 as it was when written in 1995. If you are among the target audience I cited above this will prove to be a valuable resource, and a gold mine of advanced ideas on reliability and quality.

The book contains a carefully selected collection of articles on requirements engineering by many well-known authors. Some of the articles are original milestone papers (Boehm's on Spiral Process), some are specifically created or adopted for this publication(A.Davis's survey of documenting techniques). Thayer and Dorfman suceeded at maintaining a fine balance between being academic and practical. They do not advocate any methods or processes - they just present the best of accumulated knowledge. I shall warn that it can be a bit taxing read if you are a faint-hearted. But if you strive to be a professional, you will rip long-term benefits from (reading at least some of) the articles. The curious practitioner will have an opportunity to understand what software requirements are and where they fit into software process. Recommendation: buy now.

As a Space Law practitioner, researcher, and author I have found this book'to be one of the most useful, complete and original among all the existing books in this field..