Mastering Software Craftsmanship: An Industrial Practitioner Perspective

Software Craftsmanship is about professionalism in software development. The “craftsmanship” metaphor is based on the notion of professional craftsmen who take responsibility for their work and aim to achieve mastery –not only as individuals but also as part of a community. Especially in the context of developing and extending high-quality systems with long lifecycles, it is important that we nurture a strong culture of professionalism in software development. This includes both technical aspects such as automated tests, addressing technical debt, and refactoring as well as cultural aspects such as responsibility, failure culture, embracing change, and continuous learning. This paper describes what we, as industrial practitioners, mean by professionalism and describes our global training program that sets the foundation for this way of working. This is accompanied by a software craftsmanship program that enables software engineers to continuously learn, further increase their mastery of craftsmanship and apply what they learned on their current and future projects.