Ramsay Millar on trends in software process improvement

An interesting read is this DDJ article by Ramsay Millar in which he describes these trends he sees happening in software process improvement:

• A shift towards more collaborative, role-based teamwork and away from the “lone wolf” IT culture of code-and-fix.
• A wish to close the gap between business requirements and software delivery by applying an agile process and best-of-breed automation to the entire software development life cycle.
• An increasing acceptance and sophistication of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard.

Software Carpentry

Software Carpentry presents an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers that “introduces them to the 10% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 90% of their needs”.

It covers the topics:

• Shell programming
• Version control
• Automating builds
• Python
• Systematic debugging
• Higher-level programming
• Testing
• Coding style and reading code
• Data crunching
• Web programming and security
• Software development project tools and processes

If you program for a hobby, or even professionally, this may teach you a few strategies and techniques to improve your skills or the quality of the programs you produce.