software quality

Do Bad Programmers Know About Technical Debt?

October 16, 2009

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 a blog where somebody is talking about adopting a simpler approach to programming and then use […]

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Technical Debt Quadrant

October 14, 2009

Martin Fowler clears up some of the confusion around the term “technical debt”: The debt metaphor reminds us about the choices we can make with design flaws. The prudent debt to reach a release may not be worth paying down if the interest payments are sufficiently small — such as if it were in a […]

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The Duct-Tape Programmer Explained

October 2, 2009

Hope you had the time to read through all the essays linked to in yesterday’s post about the reactions to Joel Spolsky’s article “The Duct-Tape Programmer”. Here is my take on it. The use of the words “Duct-Tape” was only chosen by Joel as a flame bait, as he admits on his Twitter feed. Joel has a […]

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Why Developers Say, “It Works On My System”

August 28, 2009

Because it is not as bad as saying, “Don’t blame me for it.” “It works on my computer” is one of those things that reminds me of how pedestrians behave as drivers and vice versa. The pedestrian feels that the driver should be careful and drive safely, but the same person, as a driver, hates […]

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Zero Defect Software

August 27, 2009

Tim Barcz has an interesting post about striving for software with zero defects: I think we should not shy away from holding ourselves to an excessively high standard.  Frankly, I’m more familiar with how to do it as a developer having years of building software to gain knowledge and experience from.  I don’t have all […]

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Tom DeMarco on Software Engineering

July 19, 2009

Tom DeMarco has written a thoughtful and introspective article on software engineering (PDF). In that, he questions some of his early work on metrics, wondering if it is still relevant. He suggests that there was too much focus on time and budget deadlines when the more important goal should have been making great software. strict […]

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