-
I am a bit of a SciFi geek. There ... I have admitted it. No, not one of those weird SciFi fans that turns up at Trekkie or Trekker conventions (does knowing there are two terms make me an even worse geek???). On the whole, when it comes to modern SciFi I prefer to see it and hear it on the big screen...
-
Roy makes a number of accusations about the Alt.net community, particularly centred around their espoused ideals clashing with their comments and blogs. I respect Roy greatly, his blog was one of my first real sources for great TDD information, and he has consitently put out great blog posts and software...
-
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...
-
Prompted partially by some comments yesterday on my post on How to Make Late Software, Even Later , and partially by a discussion on the altdotnet Yahoo list, I wrote this long email. As it became an epic in its own right, I thought it deserved a blog. We Are Doing Agile! I can claim to be doing Agile...
-
I'll start by quoting Brooks Law , as no doubt you expect me to: Brooks's law is a principle in software development which says that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" . It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month The truth of this is...
-
Simple Without a doubt, simple code is better code - more really is less. To misquote Einstein, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler". Rarely have I encountered complicated code that needed to be complicated, even complicated logic does not not require complicated code. If...
-
After a nice offer to join the blog roll at devlicio.us I have decided to retire my existing blog at http://blog.goinsane.co.uk/ , and move across to devlicio.us for my blogging. I see this as an opportunity to rant at a new audience ... but I may post something useful from time to time too.