The Pragmatic Programmer - Chapter 9: Pragmatic Projects and Postface

Pragmatic Teams

• Pragmatic team:
  • Under 10 members.
  • Members come and go rarely.
  • Everyone knows everyone well.
  • Everyone trusts and depends on each other.
• Quality can come only from the individual contributions of all team members.
• Encourage everyone to actively monitor the environment for changes.
• Schedule your knowledge portfolio to make it happen.
• Frictionless means it’s easy and low-ceremony to ask questions, share your progress, your problems, your insights and learnings, and to stay aware of what your teammates are doing.
• Deliver when users need it.
• Overly investing in any particular methodology can leave you blind to alternatives.

Pragmatic Starter Kit

• Build, test, and deployment should be triggered via commits or pushes to version control service.
• Test easy, test often, test automatically.
• Use saboteurs to test your testing.
• Test state coverage, not code coverage.
• Once a human tester finds a bug, it shoudl be the last time a human tester finds that bug. You need to add a new test to trap it next time.
• Don’t use manual procedures.

Delight Your Users

• Delight users, don’t just deliver code.
• You are a problem solver!

Postface

• First, do no harm.
• Don’t enable scumbags.
• It’s your life. Share it. Celebrate it. Build it and HAVE FUN!