12 Basic Software Development Practices

The gap between programming or writing code and developing software is growing.
This paradox is driven by the proliferation of easy to use tools, libraries, frameworks and OSes designed to ease the burden of software development.

Regardless of why, my experience has been that the typical software development shop is not executing on basic fundamental software development practices. A trend of late that I find even more alarming is quite often many of the programmers and managers are not even aware of or do not insist upon implementing them. It reached the point that I have enumerated 12:

12 Basic Software Development Practices

1. Source Control
2. Issue Tracking
3. Bug Tracking
4. Work Item Tracking
5. Environments
6. Integration Builds
7. Automated Builds
8. Unit Testing
9. Regression Testing
10. QA
11. Versioned Releases
12. Setups

So for a while my thinking was I can just enquire about these 12 before taking a new contract or engagement and all will be well. It is not surprising that I was always told "oh yeah we have all of that.." And it is also not surprising that expectations did not match reality. So I formulated follow on questions to determine the depth of practice.

Questions to determine depth of practice

1. Source Control

Where is the code kept?
Central location?
Individual machines?
Which version is authoritative?

2. Issue Tracking(Issues are a catch all term for everything that does not fall into the bug or work item buckets. They include but are not limited to 3rd party software issues, network issues, development machine issues.)

Is there a Central reporting tool / repository for issues?
Is there an established work flow?

3. Bug Tracking

Is there a Central reporting tool / repository for bugs?
Is there a bug workflow which includes states for:
Initial
Approved
Denied – Feature, works as designed
Denied – Not reproducible
Fixed
Verified
Reopened
Closed

4. Work Item Tracking

Is there a Central reporting tool / repository for new feature and enhancements?
Is there a work flow which includes states for:
Initial
Coded
Test
Failed
Accepted

5. Environments

Do separate environments exist for each of?
Development
Integration
Quality Assurance
User Acceptance Testing
Production

Is developer access to environments higher that Development limited?
Is developer access to environments higher than Integration denied?
Does QA or Change Management own the process of moving releases from one environment to the next?

6. Integration Builds

Does the code build from source control?
Does it build on a machine that is not a development machine?

7. Automated Builds (hourly/daily)

Is the code being built a regular basis?
Is this build done by an automated process?

8. Unit Testing

Do developers check in unit tests with their code?

9. Regression Testing

When code is built for release are all unit tests run?
Bug, Feature and QA tests?

10. QA

Is QA done by someone other than developers?
Does QA write automated or unit tests to demonstrate bugs?
Does QA write automated or unit tests to test common test cases for a feature?
Does QA write automated or unit tests for security and other required practices?

11. Versioned Releases

Is there a version number definition?
Are the products tied to the version number with each release?
Is the version number incremented with each release, both internal and external?
Does QA report bugs and test features according to version number?

12. Setups

Does each application have an install program?
If it does not have an install program are there instructions documented for manually installing the application?
After the install does the program run or is more intervention required?

Footnote. Microsoft Team System can provide them all.

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