1. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, written by eric raymond

2. principles

   1. developed from open-source projects

   2. i've squeezed them into the five categories (plus one) of our waterfall model

      1. this damages at least two sets of principles - the waterfall principles and the open source principles; oh well

   3. "(n)" indicates the n-th principle

   4. management

      1. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." - Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Chapter 11 (3)

      2. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers (7)

      3. Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one (19)

   5. requirements

      1. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging (6)

      2. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better (11)

   6. design

      1. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse) (2)

      2. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong (12)

      3. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (13)

      4. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible -- and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to! (15)

      5. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend (16)

      6. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets (17)

   7. development

      1. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around (9)

      2. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a great tool lends itself to uses you never expected (14)

   8. testing

      1. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone (8)

      2. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource (10)

   9. other

      1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch (1)

      2. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you (4)

      3. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor (5)

      4. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you (18)

This page last modified on 2 May 2001.