I came across a great video link yesterday, entitled “ Performance, Feedback, Revision ”. It’s a Canadian rapper named Baba Brinkman covering the theory of evolution and the work of Charles Darwin, and he equates evolution with how he writes his lyrics, Performance, Feedback, Revision. As I listened...
Code quality is an abstract concept again, and can be defined may ways depending on how you perceive quality. A good discussion of the many aspects of code quality can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality Some general high level objectives for software quality could...
Industry experience suggests that the design of metrics will encourage certain kinds of behaviour from the people being measured. The common phrase applied is "you get what you measure" (or "be careful what you wish for"). A Brief Explanation of Cyclomatic Complexity and Code Coverage...
Some reports will highlight lines of code as a figure to attach some relevance to, and these become measures used to establish progress. These are possibly the most misleading figures to use, in fact almost always within a well designed application and code base, the reverse is true. Good code tends...
"Working software is the primary measure of progress" Fundamentally, there is no more valid measure for progress, than the working software itself. This only leaves open to discussion, the definition of "working software". Defining "Working Software" The criterion for defining...
I got an email at the end of last week from a developer asking about Agile development. It highlights a few problems with development in general, and with Agile as a "badge of honour" that are worth exploring. It deserved a fairly detailed reply, so excerts of the email follow: I just came...