10 Best Practices for Software Engineering

See Also: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (19 best practices for creating open-source software)

Following Heroux and Willenbring's paper (http://www.sandia.gov/~maherou/docs/BarelySufficientSoftwareEngineering.pdf), here are 10 "best practices" for software engineering:

1 Issue-tracking software for requirements, features, and bugs

2 Manage source: beyond the basics

3 Use mailing lists to communicate

4 Use checklists for repeated processes

5 Barely-sufficient, source-centric documentation

6 Configuration management tools

7 Write tests first, run them often

8 Program tough stuff together

9 Use formal release process

10 Continuous process improvement