Basil Vandegriend: Professional Software Development

One fairly common coding style I have seen from more experienced developers is what I will call highly-aggressive null checking. Such developers have most likely been burned by null pointer exceptions in the past and hence have evolved a style of coding which confirms that parameters or fields are non-null before using them. The code […]

Code reviews are an important practice for improving the quality of your software and ensuring that it is ready for release. Software engineering research has found that reviews (or inspections) are a powerful QA practice and have many advantages over testing:

A higher percentage of defects are found when using reviews – as high as […]

When are you done writing a piece of code? Is it when you have implemented the necessary functionality? When you have tested it? I believe there is more to professional-quality code than just getting it to function properly. What else is there? Making sure the code is maintainable - well designed and understandable. I use […]

My previous article discussed the question how much do you code?. After thinking more about this, I realized that a more important question is whether you are doing enough coding. How much is enough versus too little? This depends on the reasons why you code.
For myself, I can think of several reasons why I […]

As a software developer, how much time do you actually spend writing code? I recently have discussed this topic with both junior and senior coworkers, from which I have realized that this is a very important question for many developers. The amount of time the average developer actually spends coding can be surprisingly small, and […]

What’s your process for fixing a defect? What do you do when you are informed that a feature you developed isn’t working to the users’ satisfaction, or even worse fails to work at all? Here’s what I do.

Initial investigation. My goal is to reproduce the reported problem in the application in my development environment. This […]

When coding in Java, I prefer to declare local variables at their point of use. On a recent project, I have encountered developers who have been taught in their computing science course(s) to put local variable declarations at the start of the method (when using Java). Back in the days of C this was a […]