As an architect observing and helping multiple teams build and maintain enterprise software, sometimes I think I am living in an alternate reality. I see systems fail on a nearly daily basis, teams under intense schedule pressure, a lack of awareness of basic developer quality practices, repeated failures of communication, servers taking weeks to provision, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘software development’
Recently I have been looking for ways to make a Java build run faster. This is something I seem to do at least once a year, typically as a result of the application’s production code base and automated test suite both growing in size over time. The build had previously already been split into multiple [...]
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I have noticed a common problem afflicting small development teams formed to make significant enhancements to an application that was previously maintained by just one developer. Both the original maintenance developer and their management are accustomed to essentially solo development and this culture spills into the enhancement work. Development is treated as individual efforts rather [...]
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I forget from which source I first heard about the term “near miss” in health care, but I found the concept intriguing. A near miss is a problem with the safe delivery of care that did not actually affect the patient. Here is an example: a pharmacist in a hospital misreads the doctor’s diagnosis and [...]
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The human visual / perceptual system works less well than we think it does. We believe that we observe everything in our field of vision, but in reality our limited processing power means that we only really process and thus see what we are paying attention to. We become blind to everything else. This phenomenon [...]
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Agile methods have seen a surge of adoption within I.T. in the last few years. Agile is clearly not a fad or limited to early adopters – it has entered the mainstream and is here to stay. For those of you not yet using Agile, I wanted to provide statistics and recommendations from widely-recognized industry [...]
Software architects have many responsibilities and expectations placed upon them which can be confusing to handle. For a while now I have been condensing these demands into a small set of metaphorical roles. I have found this helpful in staying true to my broader objectives as I move between tasks or problems. The role that [...]
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There is a common perception within I.T. that Agile methods are recent innovations – the new kids on the block – and they are contrasted with the traditional waterfall approach – the old-timer that has been around for ages. This perception is propagated by events such as the widely-discussed 10-year anniversary of the agile manifesto [...]
Deploying Java EE applications into a WebSphere application server typically requires configuration within WebSphere of settings such as data sources, thread pool sizes, and maximum heap size. The WebSphere Administration Console provides a graphical user interface for easily doing this setup, but the fatal flaw of this approach is that it is manual – repeating [...]
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In my prior post The Trouble with Traceability I discussed the problems with doing requirements traceability, especially formal traceability using approaches like a requirements traceability matrix (RTM). Despite the flaws with traceability the underlying objective is sound: ensure that everything the customer or user requires is correctly delivered. So how can we achieve this objective? [...]
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In software development traceability is the linkage of requirements to the software and/or development artifacts like design or test cases. The underlying objective is to ensure that everything the customer or user requires has been correctly delivered. I have no quibbles with this goal, but in practice the applications of traceability I have seen leave [...]
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To fix defects or not fix defects, that is the question: whether it is better to suffer the complaints of outraged users, or to divert effort to investigate and eliminate them. Shakespeare quotes aside, every software development project has to make decisions on how many defects to fix and which ones to leave alone prior [...]
I am a believer in minimizing software documentation that lives outside the code. This does not, however, mean no documentation. There are a number of reasons why documentation can be useful, especially for larger organizations: Documentation is more effective than code at communicating high-level or cross-cutting design and operational concerns. Larger organizations or distributed organizations [...]
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One question I often ask when giving job interviews is “What do you find most disturbing when reviewing code?” The answers I receive are especially interesting when compared to the interviewee’s results doing an actual code review: it is rare for them to identify the problems they consider the most disturbing. This lack of congruence [...]
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How do you ensure high quality when developing software? The processes that are used, the decisions that are made, and the actions that are taken must be aligned with proven quality principles. In this context I define a principle to be a fundamental truth that is the foundation for a system of behavior. Too often [...]
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The other day I was composing a tweet and it struck me that the difficulties I faced in crafting my message to fit within 140 characters without using abbreviations was a good exercise for making me a better writer. After further reflection I generalized this specific case to a broader principle about personal development: performing [...]
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I recently performed a series of optimizations to reduce an application’s memory usage. After completing several of these I noticed that there was a common theme to many of my optimizations that I could explicitly apply to help identify further opportunities for improvement. As a reoccuring solution, this qualifies as a design pattern which I [...]
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I have recently observed myself and others having a variety of reactions when defects are found ranging between the extremes of elation and despair. How should we feel when defects are discovered? Should this vary by role? Role-Based Attitudes I will first answer this question on a role by role basis, starting with the role [...]
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I recently had the opportunity to travel to Calgary, Alberta to visit the CGI office there and hang out with several of the development teams. These teams have extensive experience with larger-scale agile development including both XP and Scrum and have a good reputation for having a great development culture that excels at mentoring and [...]
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I have been asked several times recently about the question of when testing can be considered ‘done’ for a piece of software? A related form of this question is to ask when one should stop testing. This applies to both developers and testers for any type of testing ranging from writing automated unit tests to [...]
