Software Quality

I've had this blog post in one form or another of draft for several years now. I hesitated to complete it, in part because at the best of times cultural observations can easily be misinterpreted and also in part because of the role I had in working with many outsourcing vendors across Asia. Whilst the former hesitation has in no way changed, the latter has and I think it's a genuinely interesting topic worth sharing, particularly before my outsourcing memories fade too far. One thing before I begin: these are opinions based on personal observations. I'll qualify them wherever possible and articulate my experiences as far as I can but they remain just that - my experiences. I'll also be...

There are few things more frustrating than trying to make other peoples’ code work; broken references, missing dependencies, extraneous and useless files – it’s all part of the joy of sharing the project love around. This is often tricky enough for people on the same team but throw in distance, culture and varying levels of expertise and things get ugly pretty quickly. I come across these issues pretty frequently and the pattern is constant enough that I reckon it deserves just a little bit of effort to jot down some practices to streamline things. The concepts are pretty broad and generally interchangeable across technologies but I’m picking .NET examples because I can share some tangible...

Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get it so wrong? Why are some of the really core, fundamentals of version control systems often so poorly understood? I boil it down to 10 practices – or “commandments” if you like – which often break down or are not properly understand to begin with. These are all relevant to version control products of all types and programming languages of all flavours. I’ll...

I love a good set of automatically generated code metrics. There’s something about just pointing a tool at the code base and saying “Over there – go and do your thing” which really appeals to the part of me that wants to quantify and measure. I think part of it is the objectiveness of automated code analysis. Manual code reviews are great, but other than the manual labour issue, there’s always that degree of subjectiveness the human bring with them. Of course code reviews are still important, but generated findings and metrics are always a nice complement and because they can be done automatically, you can do them as frequently as you like. One...

Often times in the software industry you’ll hear statements suggesting that the quality of  the underlying software code is really not that important and what matters most is immediate term customer satisfaction, primarily achieved by delivering what they asked for within time and budget. This is usually a position put forward by the customer facing folks within the software industry who, in their defence, probably don’t have that strong a grasp on why code quality is important simply because they’re not living and breathing it. So let me give you an example. Gold membership!Yesterday I was both surprised and delighted to receive the following email from Virgin Blue, our local Australian arm...