Software Engineering at Google

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering.

How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.

You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code:

• How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time
• How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization
• What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions.

Table of Contents

• Part I. Thesis

Chapter 1. What Is Software Engineering?

• Part II. Culture

Chapter 2. How to Work Well on Teams

Chapter 3. Knowledge Sharing

Chapter 4. Engineering for Equity

Chapter 5. How to Lead a Team

Chapter 6. Leading at Scale

Chapter 7. Measuring Engineering Productivity

• Part III. Processes

Chapter 8. Style Guides and Rules

Chapter 9. Code Review

Chapter 10. Documentation

Chapter 11. Testing Overview

Chapter 12. Unit Testing

Chapter 13. Test Doubles

Chapter 14. Larger Testing

Chapter 15. Deprecation

• Part IV. Tools

Chapter 16. Version Control and Branch Management

Chapter 17. Code Search

Chapter 18. Build Systems and Build Philosophy

Chapter 19. Critique: Google’s Code Review Tool

Chapter 20. Static Analysis

Chapter 21. Dependency Management

Chapter 22. Large-Scale Changes

Chapter 23. Continuous Integration

Chapter 24. Continuous Delivery

Chapter 25. Compute as a Service

• Part V. Conclusion

About the Author

Titus Winters is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2010. Today, he is the chair of the global subcommittee for the design of the C++ standard library. At Google, he is the library lead for Google’s C++ codebase: 250 million lines of code that will be edited by 12K distinct engineers in a month. For the last 7 years, Titus and his teams have been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Along the way he has started several Google projects that believed to be in the top 10 largest refactorings in human history. As a direct result of helping to build out refactoring tooling and automation, Titus has encountered first-hand a huge swath of the shortcuts that engineers and programmers may take to “just get something working”. That unique scale and perspective has informed all of his thinking on the care and feeding of software systems.

Tom Manshreck is a Staff Technical Writer within Software Engineering at Google since 2005, responsible for developing and maintaining many of Google’s core programming guides in infrastructure and language. Since 2011, he has been a member of Google’s C++ Library Team, developing Google’s C++ documentation set, launching (with Titus Winters) Google’s C++ training classes, and documenting Abseil, Google’s open source C++ code. Tom holds a BS in Political Science and a BS in History from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Google, Tom worked as a Managing Editor at Pearson/Prentice Hall and various startups.

Hyrum K. Wright is a Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2012, mainly in the areas of large-scale maintenance of Google’s C++ codebase. Hyrum has made more individual edits to Google’s codebase than any other engineer in the history of the company. He is a member of the Apache Software and an occasional visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. Hyrum received a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and also holds an MS from the University of Texas and a BS from Brigham Young University. He is an active speaker at conferences and contributor to the academic literature on software maintenance and evolution.