Building systems that other people will have to maintain.
15 topics · 25 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Kent Beck et al. · 2001
A short joint statement by seventeen practitioners naming working software, customer collaboration and response to change as more valuable than the…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. · 1986
Software's essential complexity cannot be removed by tooling, so no single technique will deliver an order-of-magnitude gain.
+8 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules
David L. Parnas · 1972
Argues a system should be decomposed by hiding design decisions module by module, not by dividing it into processing steps, because that is what lets…
+9 more at this level
12 of 25 works
Kent Beck et al.
A short joint statement by seventeen practitioners naming working software, customer collaboration and response to change as more valuable than the process and documentation-heavy methods that preceded them.
Martin Fowler
Argues that integrating and testing code many times a day, rather than in a late 'integration phase', is what actually catches the defects that big-bang integration finds too late to fix cheaply.
Scott Chacon & Ben Straub
Explains Git's object model of commits, trees and blobs as a content-addressed graph, arguing this is the idea that makes the rest of the tool's behaviour predictable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Amy Brown & Greg Wilson
Collects the actual architects of major open-source projects explaining the structural decisions behind their systems, arguing architecture is best learned from real designs rather than abstract principle.
Eric Sink
Walks through the same small project under five different version control systems side by side, arguing the underlying concepts, not any one tool's syntax, are what actually matters.
Zeller et al.
Treats debugging as an algorithmic process that can itself be automated and taught step by step, from print statements to delta debugging and automatic fault localisation.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Software's essential complexity cannot be removed by tooling, so no single technique will deliver an order-of-magnitude gain.
Assumes having worked on software big enough to have gone wrong; no code and no mathematics
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ward Cunningham
Introduces the debt metaphor: shipping code that is not quite right to meet a deadline is a loan, and the interest is the extra effort every future change must pay.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter Norvig
Argues that many of the Gang of Four's design patterns are workarounds for missing language features, and that dynamic, higher-order languages implement several of them invisibly.
Richard P. Gabriel
Uses Christopher Alexander's architectural theory of patterns and 'habitability' to argue that software quality comes from qualities code has for the humans who must live in it, not from correctness alone.
Serge Demeyer, Stéphane Ducasse & Oscar Nierstrasz
Catalogues reengineering as a repeatable pattern language — first understand the system, then detect problems, then migrate it — arguing legacy code should be treated as an engineering discipline rather than a one-off rescue.
Ben Moseley & Peter Marks
Complexity is the single greatest source of software failure, and most of it is accidental state that could be designed away.
66 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026