Capers Jones on Software Quality and Productivity - Episode 150

Jul 19, 2021

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This week, Jeffrey is joined by Capers Jones! Capers is a software engineer and prolific researcher and publisher. He's written over 17 books on software engineering, software metrics, and software best practices — covering quality, productivity, and many other topics. He is a founder of Namcook Analytics, which is an international software consulting company where he currently serves as the Chief Scientist. Mr. Jones has spoken at numerous conferences and also advises international governments in software engineering. Capers started his career as a software engineer in the Office of the Surgeon General for the United States but found his passion for research and advisement at IBM where he developed methods of large project cost estimation as well as methods for productivity and quality measurement.

Today, Capers continues to publish, speak and advise while he bridges the learnings and data of over 20,000 software projects to modern tools, languages, and software challenges. His latest book, Software Development Patterns and Antipatterns, is coming out in August 2021. You can pre-order it now on Amazon!

In this conversation, Capers shares about his career in software engineering and researching; his upcoming book, Software Development Patterns and Antipatterns; trends he has noticed in recent data and his research; and big shifts that developers should be aware of in the industry. Capers also gives his thoughts on defect prevention techniques, design review, decomposition, formal inspection, static analysis, reusability, and more. This episode is jampacked with information on software quality and productivity — so don’t miss out!

Topics of Discussion:

[:14] About The Azure DevOps Podcast, Clear Measure, the new podcast Architect Tips, and Jeffrey’s offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:22] About today’s episode with Capers Jones.

[2:45] Jeffrey welcomes Capers to the podcast!

[3:19] What led Capers into this field of software engineering and research as well as some of his major career highlights.

[7:07] Capers recommends how to read through his body of work.

[8:32] About Capers’ upcoming book, Software Development Patterns and Antipatterns.

[9:26] Key practices that Caper recommends every team should be engaging in.

[12:25] Has Capers found a difference in the trend of bugs for people who have decomposed software systems into multiple, smaller parts vs. keeping them all as a part of one codebase? (AKA the microservices movement)

[13:32] Capers talks defect prevention techniques.

[15:12] Defect detection or prevention/removal techniques for enterprise developers, or those running business applications, should employ.

[16:16] What is a design review and how can you conduct one?

[17:27] Ways that Capers has seen to implement a formal inspection that work well.

[19:05] Capers’ thought process on static analysis today and what the data is showing.

[19:48] Capers shares what has changed in software engineering recently due to new data and research.

[23:04] Capers speaks about the importance of including users in the conversation as systems are being developed.

[24:25] Capers talks about‘ reuseability’ when it comes to producing ½ million-1 million+ lines of code.

[25:16] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure.

[25:48] Capers gives practical advice based on research for mid-sized companies with 5-10 developers.

[27:53] Capers’ thoughts on function points (and any objective measures for software size) in the modern world.

[28:42] What can development managers do to measure how big the software system is going to be, if their team is high-performing, etc.?

[30:05] What tool does Caper recommend to use?

[31:17] Caper gives a rundown of which tools you should be considering.

[33:51] How much new data has been gathered in the last several years compared to the past?

[34:15] What can a team do to submit their past projects to be included in the research?

[35:16] How and why you should apply function points today.

[41:08] Half of the developers in the industry today have less than 7 years of experience which means the number of programmers has doubled since 2014! Capers shares his thoughts on this.

[43:50] Capers and Jeffrey discuss other data and statistics regarding the industry.

[45:15] Capers shares some parting words on how and why you should pick up his newest book, Software Development Patterns and Antipatterns.

[46:03] Jeffrey thanks Capers for joining the podcast.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Architect Tips — New video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

Jeffrey Palermo’s Youtube

Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Namcook Analytics