Titus Winters - Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

by Titus Winters , Tom Manshreck , and Hyrum Wright

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978-1-492-08279-8

[LSI]

I have always been endlessly fascinated with the details of how Google does things. I have grilled my Googler friends for information about the way things really work inside of the company. How do they manage such a massive, monolithic code repository without falling over? How do tens of thousands of engineers successfully collaborate on thousands of projects? How do they maintain the quality of their systems?

Working with former Googlers has only increased my curiosity. If youve ever worked with a former Google engineer (or Xoogler, as theyre sometimes called), youve no doubt heard the phrase at Google we Coming out of Google into other companies seems to be a shocking experience, at least from the engineering side of things. As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises.

In Software Engineering at Google, a set of Googlers (and some Xooglers) gives us a lengthy blueprint for many of the practices, tools, and even cultural elements that underlie software engineering at Google. Its easy to overfocus on the amazing tools that Google has built to support writing code, and this book provides a lot of details about those tools. But it also goes beyond simply describing the tooling to give us the philosophy and processes that the teams at Google follow. These can be adapted to fit a variety of circumstances, whether or not you have the scale and tooling. To my delight, there are several chapters that go deep on various aspects of automated testing, a topic that continues to meet with too much resistance in our industry.

The great thing about tech is that there is never only one way to do something. Instead, there is a series of trade-offs we all must make depending on the circumstances of our team and situation. What can we cheaply take from open source? What can our team build? What makes sense to support for our scale? When I was grilling my Googler friends, I wanted to hear about the world at the extreme end of scale: resource rich, in both talent and money, with high demands on the software being built. This anecdotal information gave me ideas on some options that I might not otherwise have considered.

With this book, weve written down those options for everyone to read. Of course, Google is a unique company, and it would be foolish to assume that the right way to run your software engineering organization is to precisely copy their formula. Applied practically, this book will give you ideas on how things could be done, and a lot of information that you can use to bolster your arguments for adopting best practices like testing, knowledge sharing, and building collaborative teams.

You may never need to build Google yourself, and you may not even want to reach for the same techniques they apply in your organization. But if you arent familiar with the practices Google has developed, youre missing a perspective on software engineering that comes from tens of thousands of engineers working collaboratively on software over the course of more than two decades. That knowledge is far too valuable to ignore.

Camille Fournier
Author, The Managers Path