Rethinking Design Patterns

Jeff Atwood has a good post entitled Rethinking Design Patterns.
It’s certainly worthwhile for every programmer to read Design Patterns at least once, if only to learn the shared vocabulary of common patterns.
No matter what you think of design patterns, you have to read the book at least one time. I remember a talk with a [...]

Abject-Oriented Programming

The number of lines of code in the application is a common measure of the importance of the application, and the number of lines a programmer can produce in a day, week, or month is a useful metric for project planning and resource allocation. Abject-oriented programming is one of the best ways to get the [...]

Top 20 Stupid Client Quotes

Can you guarantee to us that we’ll get as many lines of code from you as we would if we hired a professional company to build this?
Top 20 Stupid Client Quotes at Clientcopia.

SE Process 101: Habitability

I always wanted my blog to be about my thoughts on software engineering. I feel they have matured long enough now for me to try and write them down. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a series where I give my opinion about what’s important when developing software.
Some would argue that process is at the [...]

CUSEC 2007 Summary

CUSEC 2007 was last week, from thursday to saturday, and it was good. Once again the organization was great (except for every day starting 30 mins behind schedule). However, I can only say that CUSEC was good, not great. It’s a conference targeting student, so it may be possible that after working a year, and [...]

Software Project Success/Failure Criteria: Some Surprises by Robert L. Glass

Results from a survey concerning 400 IT projects:

What were the surprises?

Most projects that had no schedule were successful
Requirements are needed for project success, but not necessarily early in the project
Projects often continue successfully for some time with unclear requirements
The choice of requirements methodology does not matter; UML was “no help”

Success/Failure Criteria: Some Surprises by Robert [...]

Martin Fowler RailsConf 2006 Keynote Address

Martin Fowler RailsConf 2006 Keynote Address
Very interesting speech.

Backblog: Anecdotal Evidence

In the next few weeks, I will be going through the backlog of things I accumulated in the last months that I want to touch in this blog. The first one dates back from october, but ties in nicely with my last posts about CUSEC. It’s from Martin Fowler.
This approach – some people report [...]

Soap Opera Testing

Seen at Exploration Through Example
Soap opera tests exaggerate and complicate scenarios in the way that television soap operas exaggerate and complicate real life.
That one is just too funny to pass on. Next time you write a test case and want to come up with the worst scenario (everything going bad), imagine you are writing a [...]

ScalpelSheepVisitor

sirenian: BDD: The campaign against testing
“Test”, in Test Driven Development, encapsulates the idea of specification, design, verification of implementation and the ability to confidently refactor. Regression testing itself is almost a by-product of these uses of the word “test”.(…)Don’t test; think “What should this class do? What are its roles and responsibilities? What does it [...]