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 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘software development’
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 [...]
Two recent experiences prompted me to think deeply about how software developers start out in the field and develop their expertise.
The first experience was reading an article by Uncle Bob titled Master Craftsman Teams. Bob’s main point is that the current model of developing expertise based on entering the field with a four year [...]
Build automation has been the theme of my recent learning activities, so when I came across multiple positive references to a tool called FindBugs I decided to give it a try. My conclusion: FindBugs is worth using on all Java projects. Read below for the details.
FindBugs is a Java static analysis tool that scans compiled [...]
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This tutorial explains how to set up and write automated unit tests in Java using JUnit 4, a widely used java unit testing framework, Eclipse 3, an open source integrated development environment (IDE), and Java SE 5 or later. This tutorial is intended to be an introduction to unit testing aimed at developers who [...]
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I recently needed to parse a XML file using Java for a utility I was writing. A couple of years ago I used dom4j to parse XML (and wrote an article about it). I figured there had to be a more modern approach, similar to how Hibernate 3.0 can map POJOs (plain old Java objects) [...]
I recently read an interesting research paper titled Metrics and Laws of Software Evolution – The Nineties View by Lehman et al in the 1997 proceedings of the Software Metrics Symposium that discusses eight laws of software evolution. One set of graphs within the paper jumped out at me: they show the incremental growth of two systems over a series of releases. The graphs shared a common pattern: releases with higher than average incremental growth tended to alternate with one or more releases with lower than average growth. What are the implications of this commonly observed behavior for developing and using software? How can we use this pattern to our advantage? Read on to see my answers to these questions.
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