students learn how to enhance sparsely-documented legacy code. In priority
order, other requests were making testing a first-class citizen, working with
non-technical customers, and working in teams. The social skills needed to
work effectively with nontechnical customers and work well in teams surely
are helpful for the developers’ whole careers; the question is how to fit them
into one book. Similarly, no one questions the emphasis on testing; the
question is how to get novices to embrace it. Thus, we needed a software
methodology that also works well with legacy code, emphasizes testing,
integrates non-technical customers, and embraces working in teams rather
than as lone wolves.
Coincidentally, about the same time that SaaS appeared on the scene, a group
of developers proposed the The Agile Manifesto in 2001, which was a radical
change from prior methods. One of the founding tenets of Agile is
“responding to change over following a plan,” so it is a much better match to
the quickly evolving nature of SaaS than traditional “Plan-and-Document”
methodologies like Waterfall, Spiral, or RUP. Another Agile tenet is
“customer collaboration over contract negotiation,” which leads to weekly
meetings with non-technical customers. Two critical Agile foundations are
behavior-driven development and test-driven development, which means
tests are written before the code, so testing really is a first class citizen in
Agile. Agile ideas like pair programming and scrum emphasize working
with others. Agile techniques are even a good match to evolving legacy code,
as well shall see.
Therefore, the second half of the book explains Agile in the context of
building and deploying a SaaS application implemented using Ruby on Rails.
In addition, each chapter gives the perspective of the Plan-and-Document
methodologies on topics like requirements, testing, management, and
maintenance. This contrast allows readers to decide for themselves when
each methodology is appropriate for SaaS and non-SaaS applications.
From an instructor’s perspective, these dual views of software development
allow the book to be used for software engineering courses. For example,
we’ve made sure that the material fulfills all the requirements of the 2013
ACM/IEEE curriculum standard for Software Engineering; in fact, roughly
45 of the end-of-chapter exercises come directly from the learning outcomes
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