Submitted by drader on December 29, 2009 - 8:37pm.In a previous blog entry, I mentioned 10 Steps to Improve Software Development Process. If you read these and pause for a minute, you'll notice that many of these are actually principles of Agile development. I want to expand on a few of these thoughts here.
Submitted by drader on December 23, 2009 - 7:29pm.I love data visualization techniques. From my early days as a operations data analyst and all of my software development career, finding patterns in data and finding an easy way to convey the pattern through a graph or other visualization has always been fun. Working on custom application development projects that provided a picture of how the business was doing, where customers were spending, etc is fun.
Submitted by drader on November 28, 2009 - 12:09pm.I spend a lot of time working with customers and talking with colleagues about how to build better software,faster, and cheaper. Yes, "better, faster, cheaper" is hard, may be impossible, but boy is it an enticing goal in custom application development. Our discussions often look at various technologies that promise improvements -Silver Bullets.
Submitted by drader on November 14, 2009 - 8:14am.I was excited to see the announcement that JetBrains is making the core IntelliJ platform available under an Apache 2.0 Open Source license. IntelliJ is a great IDE, and one of the main ones we use for Java application development. Having a community edition that makes the platform available more widely is great and hopefully will enable more developers to take advantage of the great quality checking and productivity tools IntelliJ has.
Submitted by drader on November 14, 2009 - 7:56am.I have the opportunity to review and analyze a lot of different application code bases, across a number of difference technology stacks. Some of these are custom software applications that Alliance is building or maintaining for our clients. Some of these are open source packages we are using in our work. Others are analyzed for our clients as part of our Application Assessment and software testing outsourcing solution.
Submitted by drader on November 4, 2009 - 9:25am.There are many discussions about productivity and ways to increase quality in software development. There is no single magic bullet, but by far the most important overall technique I've ever seen is to aggressively automate the software development process and overall lifecycle.
Submitted by drader on October 18, 2009 - 8:12am.I recently read Andy Hunt's book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning." It's a very interesting book combining ideas about cognitive science, management, software development, and personal development. (It's also well written and fun to read)
Submitted by drader on October 10, 2009 - 7:39am.A colleague of mine read my recent post about code quality and reminded me of the first time he read my musings about code quality, and work habits. He pulled up a team Best Practices document I had written back in 2001 for one of our first .net application development projects, and it's great to see how much is still 100% relevant today.
Work Habits
Submitted by drader on October 8, 2009 - 8:51am.All good developers have a sense for Good Quality Code. They may call it "clean code" or talk about it is easy to maintain. When code is not good, they talk about "code smells" or "ugly code" or that it is simply "unreadable". Good developers have this sense, even when "good" is not strictly defined and is not measurable. Good developers go out of their way to keep the code that they work on clean, maintainable, and easy to read.
Submitted by drader on September 28, 2009 - 9:56am.As a "dweeb", I love learning about new technologies. New programming languages, new frameworks, new Open Source tools. I love talking with colleagues about how we can use these great new technologies to solve interesting problems Faster, Better, Cheaper in order to make our clients happy.
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