I have recently been wrestling with the problem of clarifying the concept of capability levels for software developers. What does it mean to call a developer junior versus intermediate? How can a developer at one level progress to the next? How do you evaluate the capability of a developer? These questions and more formed the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘software development’
How do you go about designing and coding software? More specifically, what is your mental process for accomplishing this? Becoming more aware of the approach you use allows you to deliberately control and improve it. Mental thought processes are, however, very intangible and difficult to put into words. In the software development literature much has [...]
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If the goal of software development is to produce working software then developers need to know more than just how to code – they need to know how to prevent or eliminate functional and non-functional defects.
Too many developers think their job is complete once a feature has been coded. Sometimes they think that it is [...]
There is an interesting relationship between having predictable estimates for project management and using a thorough definition of done.
Achieving the full definition of done for a feature or release (often called being done-done) is surprisingly difficult. You may have heard the anecdotal rule of thumb that it takes 80% of the time to achieve 80% [...]
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I have written previously about the importance of having a definition of done that the team understands and adheres to. At the level of features (use cases, user stories, etc.) a comprehensive definition of done will often consist of a number of items, some involving non-developer roles such as tester, business analyst, and architect. Tracking [...]
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I am a big proponent of using to do comments – comments prefixed by a specific identifier such as “TODO” – in a code base to indicate outstanding tasks or issues with the code. I have encountered developers who are either unfamiliar with the practice or who do not follow it as deliberately as I [...]
My previous article discussed the importance of defining success as it relates to software projects and products. Now I want to look at some typical definitions of success and identify problems or short-comings with these definitions. From this analysis I aim to point the way towards a better definition of what success entails.
Typical Definitions [...]
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I was recently doing some performance tuning and made the surprising discovery that doing less caching in Hibernate actually improved performance in a particular scenario. When I discovered the problem this seemed very counter-intuitive. In fact, my original design maximized the use of caching in order to improve performance, but the opposite happened in practice. [...]
Can you define what makes a successful software development project or product? Do you know the criteria by which your current assignment will be judged a success? Does everyone associated with the project or product share the same definition? Defining what it means to be successful may seem obvious or trivial, but I expect that [...]
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Over the years I have refined the approach I use to write code. Recently I codified a key aspect of this approach as a practice I call the Use Understood Methods Rule. The basic formulation of the rule is quite simple: when coding a method only invoke other methods whose behavior you clearly understand [...]
I wrote previously about the process I went through in adopting test driven development (TDD). In this article I discuss my experience with TDD: the benefits, the limitations, and the techniques I use when doing TDD.
Benefits
This section covers the benefits, as I see them, of doing TDD. This does not include the benefits of doing [...]
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I have always been keen on using automated unit tests since I first heard about them almost a decade ago. I have known about test driven development (TDD) for almost as long but the practice of writing tests first before writing production code never really clicked for me when I first tried it years ago. [...]
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I recently wrote about why you need a definition of done, and it only seems logical to follow this up by presenting what I use for a definition of done for developing software.
I use two guiding principles as the basis for constructing my definition.
Potentially releasable: Ideally the software can be released (or shipped) [...]
Would you trust your life to your code? It is a simple question that you might find extreme. But is it really?
You might argue that the answer to this question depends on the criticality of the software you are producing. Software like the control software for the space shuttle or software to control medical [...]
Whether you are working on a small task or a large project, do you and your team have a clear understanding of what it takes to complete a piece of work? The Scrum method of software development calls this Definition of Done and touts this as a critical practice for high-performing teams. While I have [...]
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Effective use of version control is a fundamental development practice, especially if there is more than one person working on the same code base. Below are the standard rules I use for the proper use of version control in the style of biblical old testament commandments. I like imagining an authoritative voice booming these commandments [...]
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Ivy is a tool for managing build dependencies within the Ant build tool. In this article I share my experiences using Ivy and provide recommendations on what to do and not do. This article is not a tutorial on using Ivy: for that see the Ivy documentation.
Before getting into the specifics of Ivy, the first [...]
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At the heart of the Spring Framework is its dependency injection capabilities provided by its inversion-of-control container. Traditionally the configuration of dependencies has been done in one or more separate XML files. In these files you need to specify code-specific constructs such as the concrete classes to use as implementations of interfaces. It has always [...]
This article continues on from my prior article Improving Computer Science Degrees for Software Developers on the topic of better methods of developing expertise as software developers in the work place. The original inspiration for these articles is the post Master Craftsman Teams by Robert C. Martin in which he proposed a formalized development path [...]
Software development spans a wide gamut of technologies (e.g. C, Java, and Ruby) and environments (e.g. embedded, desktop, enterprise, web, computing infrastructure, and scientific). Despite all the variation, I believe there are core software development skills that you must possess in order to be an effective developer across most, if not all, of these different [...]
