Category Archives: software development

The Reality of UI Test Automation

Michael Feathers explains how the reality of user interface test automation differs widely from the expectations: The Dream Janet comes into work in the morning and she sits down at her super-duper testing console. She presses a button and the … Continue reading

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The Case For Better Management

Stephen Forte makes what he thinks is a case against having “rock-star” developers in a team. You can read the post, but, in short, there was a programmer “John” on his team who picked coding arguments with the rest of … Continue reading

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Do The Basic Research

I fail to comprehend how someone can write this (emphasis mine): Overdesign is also very common with databases. People get hung up on rules like “third normal form”. Sometimes when you over-normalize a database is [sic] makes it impossible to … Continue reading

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When is It Good Enough?

Anecdotes are dangerous. Scott Koon has one about fixing a doorknob, linking it to the now-infamous Spolksy duct-tape programmer post and writes: Think about that the next time you reject a new programming tool because you think it might take … Continue reading

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Wrong Use of Testing Metrics

Brilliant post on testing by Michael Bolton (emphasis mine): Bug Investigation and Reporting (time spent on tests that find bugs)Test Design and Execution (time spent on tests that don’t find bugs) Module Time spent on tests that find bugs Time … Continue reading

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Cross-Platform is Not That Important

Dave Nicolette asks about C# versus Java: Consider two hypothetical programming languages such that: Language A Supports closures, and Can only run on one platform, so that customers who use the language for mission-critical apps are locked into a single … Continue reading

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Framework Failures for Beginners

Zef Hemel writes about the inscrutable error messages that he gets when making typos in Ruby on Rails, Scala and JBoss Seam. I recently saw a new programmer struggle with the RoR errors and I have been a victim of … Continue reading

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Why Your Academic Record is Important

Jon Skeet has a long post on how programmers fall prey to pretty nasty bugs because they aren’t aware of the details of what they are doing. And he offers the following thoughts: First, try not to take on more … Continue reading

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Code Readability

Rob Conery pointed out an interesting comment on his IoC post: In this simplified example above you switched from 3 lines of easily understandable code to something that requires code in the global.asax, another couple classes, and an interface. The … Continue reading

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Do Bad Programmers Know About Technical Debt?

In short, no. But why am I asking the question in the first place? Well, much discussion in the technical blogs (such as the NOOP.NL Top 200) is centered around the idea about whether a mediocre programmer will land on … Continue reading

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