Design - Build - Run: Applied Practices And Principles For Production-ready Software Development

This unique and critical book shares no-fail secrets for building software and offers tried-and-true practices and principles for software design, development, and testing for mission-critical systems that must not fail. A veteran software architect walks you through the lifecycle of a project as well as each area of production readiness--functionality, availability, performance and scalability, operability, maintainability, and extensibility, and highlights their key concepts.

Wrox's "Design - Build - Run" provides readers with concrete practices and principles for production ready software design, development and testing. For the purposes of this book, Production Readiness refers to Functionality, Availability, Performance and Scalability, Operability and Maintainability and Extensibility. The book examines each of the areas in detail, how they interrelate and provides principles and practices that "should" be applied during the earlier phases of design and construction to quantify the solution's production readiness.

"Design - Build - Run" is not intended to teach a specific programming language or technology nor is it intended to promote any particular development methodology. It provides the reader with a firm understanding of the key principles and practices required to produce production ready software systems. That said, the book will focus on Microsoft Technologies and will provide practical advice on using these services, such as WMI, Performance Counters, Event Log, Tracing and Debugging.

Inside, veteran Software Architect David Ingram provides an end-to-end web-based solution which forms the prototype and follows this through to production readiness. Starting with the basic prototype which encapsulates all the required functionality of the system, the book then examines this using each area of production readiness - Functionality, Availability, Performance and Scalability, Operability and Maintainability and Extensibility. Essentially reverse engineering the prototype and highlighting the key concepts, patterns and practices and folding these back into the early design, development and test phases to reduce development/fix timescales andreduce cost of poor quality and post production issues.

The book serves as a point of reference providing concrete examples of both the what-to and the how-to points of building production-ready software, and re-enforces its importance throughout the lifecycle of the project - especially in the early phases and not just to the final application, applying them to tools, scripts and other development activities and artifacts.

The scope of the book is restricted to the construction phase, which for the purposes of the book refers to Technical Design, Build, Unit Test and Assembly Test. Other areas of the development lifecycle are referred to but only where the key concepts are most relevant.