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Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (eds.) O'Reilly Media, 2010, 978-0596808327

Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which are true, and which are merely wishful thinking? In Making Software, leading researchers and practitioners present chapter-length summaries of key empirical findings in software engineering, and answer questions like:

• Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others?
• Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster?
• Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software?
• Does using design patterns actually make software better?
• What effect does personality have on pair programming?
• What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart?

As with The Architecture of Open Source Applications, royalties from Making Software will be donated to Amnesty International.

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