Three books changed my life as a programmer. Kernighan1981 taught me that I could do more than just write software—I could design it—while Glass2002 taught me that we could investigate software and software development scientifically, and by doing so discover what actually works and what doesn't.
In between those two books I read Hunt1999, as did many other programmers of my generation. For many of us, it was the first time someone had described the craft of software construction in a way that made sense. When I began supervising undergraduate projects at the University of Toronto in the early 2000s, I referred to it over and over again.
Looking at it and at its twentieth anniversary edition Thomas2019, I am struck by how useful it continues to be, but also by what it doesn't discuss. How do you run a meeting in a way that ensures decisions actually get made and everyone is heard? After working in tech for forty years, I believe that is the most important skill I ever learned. Why and how do tech companies build products that people don't want? Why do they marginalize women, people of color, and members of the LGBT community despite all the evidence showing that more diverse teams are more productive? And given how online platforms have fueled radicalization and disinformation in ways that threaten us all, shouldn't every guide to being a better programmer at least mention the problem?
If you are an undergraduate student embarking on a semester-long software project as part of a team, this book will give you tools that will help you succeed. Some of these are purely technical, like a version control system or an IDE; others are guidelines to help you form teams, manage people who aren't pulling their weight, cut features when time runs short, and understand who owns the things you produce.
Our aim is to teach you how to be a compassionate programmer: one who cares as much about the well-being of their colleagues and users as they do about their own. This focus is not entirely altruistic—everything you do to help others also helps your future self—but now that we all know how much harm software can do, we hope you'll be interested in some practical idealism.
All proceeds from this project will go to support the Red Door Family Shelter.
Audience
Every lesson should be written with specific learners in mind. These personas are ours:
-
Yanina is in the third year of a computer science degree. She worked on several volunteer projects in high school and through her mosque, but the "Introduction to Software Engineering" course she's about to take will be her first semester-long team project at university. This guide will help her and her teammates figure out what to do when.
-
Brad is in Yanina's classes. He started programming when he was nine years old, and as a result can do many practical assignments in half the time it takes other students (something he attributes to intelligence and aptitude rather than to his parents being able to afford to send him to after-school coding camps). He finds any discussion of what he privately called "social justice bullshit" tiresome; this guide will help him understand why that attitude is self-defeating.
-
Ahmadou worked as an illustrator for several years before doing an intensive 14-week conversion course to become a JavaScript developer. He has a lot of experience working in teams to meet deadlines, but is still often bewildered by the tools, jargon, and culture of programming. This guide will help him figure out what his new colleagues think is "normal".
-
Sharla teaches JavaScript at Yanina's college and for the conversion course that Ahmadou went through. They taught the "Introduction to Software Engineering" class last semester, and felt that they and their students wasted a lot of time on things that turned out not to be useful. This guide will help them give more structure to the next offering and set more realistic expectations.
Like these personas, readers should:
-
Be able to write multi-page programs in Java, Python, JavaScript, or some other modern programming language.
-
Be able to create static web sites using HTML and CSS.
-
Know how to create directories, delete files, and find things with the Unix shell.
-
Have used Git on individual projects.
This book can be read on its own or as a companion to Software Tools in JavaScript, which teaches the basics of software design by showing you how to build the tools you program with. If you are looking for a project to do in a course, adding a tool to those covered there would be fun as well as educational.
Topics
Life is short and your project is even shorter, so this book focuses on the handful of tools and techniques that will help you the most in the short and medium term:
-
How to work effectively in a small team when you are constantly being interrupted by other tasks like the homework for your other courses.
-
What tools you should use to build, test, deploy, and describe software in less time and with less pain.
-
How to design a program (or a set of related programs) that will take several weeks to write.
-
How a few simple changes in your study habits will enable you to learn more and more quickly.
-
What legal rights you have to the software you create as a student (and on the job).
-
What we actually know about software development and why we believe it's true.
-
What to do when things go wrong.
We have included other material as well, since there is a lot of variation between project courses (and even more between the people doing them), but the core topics include. Throughout, we are guided by a modified version of Dobzhansky's Rule:
Nothing in software engineering makes sense except in the light of psychology.
Many of the hard problems in software engineering stem from the fact that human beings think and feel, and we do those things in certain ways. Our mental capacity is limited, which means we have to design programs so that they will fit into the space between our ears. We learn and work better when we are doing things that help us meet our personal goals, which means projects will be more successful if we take motivation into account. And as we learn more, the best way for us to learn changes in predictable ways, so how we are taught should change too.
Using and Contributing
All of the written material on this site is made available under the Creative Commons - Attribution - NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-4.0), while the software is made available under the Hippocratic License. The first allows you to use and remix this material for non-commercial purposes, as-is or in adapted form, provided you cite its original source; the second allows you to use and remix the software on this site provided you do not violate international agreements governing human rights. Please see for details.
If you would like to improve what we have or add new material, please see the Code of Conduct in and the contributor guidelines in . If you have questions or would like to use this material in a course, please file an issue in this site's GitHub repository or send us email.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to Marian Petre, who taught me how to think about how programmers think and work. I am also grateful to all of the students who did projects with me at the University of Toronto and through Google Summer of Code, and to everyone who took part in UCOSP Holmes2014,Holmes2018.
I have tried to base recommendations on empirical software engineering research () and on the science of teaching and learning (). Where those don't have answers, I have drawn on the experience of the students and programmers mentioned below. Any errors, omissions, or misunderstandings that remain are entirely our fault.
Portions of this book are adapted from material that originally appeared in Sholler2019,Wilson2019,Irving2021,Smalls2021; I'm grateful to Taylor & Francis, PLOS, and my co-authors for making available under open licenses. I would also like to thank David Graf for doi2bib and Alexandra Elbakyan for Sci-Hub; this book would have been much harder to write without their idealism and hard work.