DaedTech

Stories about Software

Jul
18

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Static Analysis to Hide My Ignorance about Global Concerns

Category: .NET Tags: , , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look at CodeIt.Right to help you automate elements of your code reviews.

“You never concatenate strings.  Instead, always use a StringBuilder.”

I feel pretty confident that any C# developer that has ever worked in a group has heard this admonition at least once.  This represents one of those bits of developer wisdom that the world expects you to just memorize.  Over the course of your career, these add up.  And once they do, grizzled veterans engage in a sort of comparative jousting for rank.  The internet encourages them and eggs them on.

“How can you call yourself a senior C# developer and not know how to serialize objects to XML?!”

With two evenly matched veterans swinging language swords at one another, this volley may continue for a while.  Eventually, though, one falters and pecking order is established.

Static Analyzers to the Rescue

I must confess.  I tend to do horribly at this sort of thing.  Despite having relatively good memory retention ability in theory, I have a critical Achilles Heel in this regard.  Specifically, I can only retain information that interests me.  And building up a massive arsenal of programming language “how-could-yous” for dueling purposes just doesn’t interest me.  It doesn’t solve any problem that I have.

And, really, why should it?  Early in my career, I figured out the joy of static analyzers in pretty short order.  Just as the ubiquity of search engines means I don’t need to memorize algorithms, the presence of static analyzers saves me from cognitively carrying around giant checklists of programming sins to avoid.  I rejoiced in this discovery.  Suddenly, I could solve interesting problems and trust the equivalent of programmer spell check to take care of the boring stuff.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  After the analyzers slapped me, I internalized the lessons.  But I never bothered to go out of my way to do so.  I learned only in response to an actual, immediate problem.  “I don’t like seeing warnings, so let me figure out the issue and subsequently avoid it.”

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Jul
17

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How to Analyze a Static Analyzer

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the NDepend blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look around at some of the other posts, and sign up for the RSS feed, if you’re so inclined.

First things first.  I really wanted to call this post, “who will analyze the analyzer,” because I fancy myself clever.  This title would have mirrored the relatively famous Latin question from Satires, “who will guard the guards themselves?”  But I suspect that the confusion I’d cause with that title would outweigh any appreciation of my cleverness.

So, without any literary references whatsoever, I’ll talk about static analyzers.  More specifically, I’ll talk about how you should analyze them to determine fitness for your purpose.

Before I dive into that, however, let’s do a quick refresher on the definition of static analyzer.  This stack overflow question nails it pretty well, right at the beginning of the accepted answer.

Analyzing code without executing it. Generally used to find bugs or ensure conformance to coding guidelines.

Succinctly put, Aaron, and just so.  Most of what we do with code tends to be dynamic analysis.  Whether through automated tests or manual running of the program, we fire it up and see what happens.  Static analyzers, on the other hand, look at the code and use it to make deductions.  These include both deductions about runtime behavior and about the codebase itself.

What’s Your Goal?

Why rehash the definition?  Well, because I want to underscore the point that you can do many different things with static analyzers.  Even if you just think of them as “that thing that complains at me about the Microsoft guidelines,” they cover a whole lot more ground.

As such, your first step in sizing up the field involves setting your own goals.  What do you want out of the tool?  Some of them focus exclusively on code quality.  Others target specific concerns, such as behavioral correctness or security.  Still others simply offer so-called “linting.”  Some do a mix of many things.

Lay out your goals and expectations.  Once you’ve done that, you will find that you’ve narrowed the field considerably.  From there, you can proceed with a more apples to apples comparison.

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Jul
13

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Growing the Ideas from the Developer Hegemony Book

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , | 5 Comments

Happy reader question Friday, everyone.  Today, I’ll field a question about the Developer Hegemony book.  For any newer readers, I wrote this book over the last couple of years and published it to Amazon in early May.  For a briefer synopsis of its purpose and message, you can check out this announcement post.

The question was a lot longer than this (and contained some much appreciated kind words).  But I’ll leave out any personal details and the backstory and leave just the question (paraphrased).

Aside from joining the Facebook group on the “What Now” page and spreading the word via social media, is there anything else I could do to help you get these ideas to more developers?

For some quick housekeeping, here’s the page in question and the Facebook group, too (feel free to join!).  I appreciate the question, and I also understand it.  I mean, of course I literally understand the English language.  But I mean that I understand the necessity of the asking.

The book release coincided with my “retirement” from IT management consulting.  I went home, published a book, and dedicated my time to three simultaneous pursuits: a dev tools content marketing business, a specialized codebase analysis practice, and selling my primary residence in favor of what I think of as “cosmopolitan homelessness” (and moving).  I offer this not as an excuse, but as an explanation.  I’ve been distracted.

Me going cosmopolitan homeless following the release of the developer hegemony book.

The Developer Hegemony Book’s Promise and the What Now

The upshot of my flurry of activity has included not doing a lot to pursue or facilitate the book’s vision.  I’ve made occasional posts to the Facebook group and I’ve added some content to my Youtube channel about how to get a Tax ID and start a corporation.  But I haven’t exactly kept the pedal to the floor and started a movement in earnest.

So I’ll take on this question and the rest of the post from the perspective of “what would I do to advance the cause if days were 32 hours long and I had more time?”  After all, no one has more interest in advancing the cause than me.

I should also mention that the book contains my thoughts on how individuals and organizations can move toward Developer Hegemony.  I won’t rehash that here, opting instead to address the specifics of how to spread the ideas.

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Jul
12

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Add Custom Content to Your Documentation

Category: Uncategorized Tags: , , , |

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at GhostDoc not only to help you with comment management and generation, but also to help you construct automated help documentation.

For the last several years, I’ve made more and more of my living via entrepreneurial pursuits.  I started my career as a software developer and then worked my way along that career path before leaving fulltime employment to do my own thing.  These days, I consult, but I also make training content, write books, and offer productized services.

When you start to sell things yourself, you come to appreciate the value of marketing.  As a techie, this feels a little weird to say, but here we are.  When you have something of value to offer, marketing helps you make interested parties aware of your offer.  I think you’d like this and find it worth your money, if you gave it a shot.

In pursuit of marketing, you can use all manner of techniques.  But today, I’ll focus on a subtle one that involves generating a good reputation with those who do buy your products.  I want to talk about making good documentation.

The Marketing Importance of Documentation

This probably seems an odd choice for a marketing discussion.  After all, most of us think of marketing as what we do before a purchase to convince customers to make that purchase.  But repeat business from customer loyalty counts for a lot.  Your loyal customers provide recurring revenue and, if they love their experience, they may evangelize for your brand.

Providing really great documentation makes an incredible difference for your product.  I say this because it can mean the difference between frustration and quick, easy wins for your user base.  And, from a marketing perspective, which do you think makes them more likely to evangelize?  Put yourself in their shoes.  Would you recommend something hard to figure out?

For a product with software developers as an end user, software documentation can really go a long way.  And with something like GhostDoc’s “build help documentation” feature, you can notch this victory quite easily.  But the fact that you can generate that documentation isn’t what I want to talk about today, specifically.

Instead, I want to talk about going the extra mile by customizing it.

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Jul
11

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How to Write Test Cases

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , | 7 Comments

Editorial note: I originally this post for the Stackify blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, check out Stackify’s APM offering.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I have a good bit of experience writing unit tests.  In fact, I’ve managed to parlay this experience into a nice chunk of my living.  This includes consulting, training developers, building courses, and writing books.  From this evidence, one might conclude that unit testing is in demand.

Because of the demand and driving interest, I find myself at many companies, explaining the particulars of testing to many different people.  We’d like some of testing magic here, please.  Help us boost our quality.

A great deal of earnest interest in the topic lays the groundwork for improvement.  But it also lays the groundwork for confusion.  When large groups of people set out to learn new things, buzzwords can get tossed around and meaning lost.

Against this backdrop, I can recall several different people at asking, “how should we/our people write good test cases?”  If you’re familiar with the terms at play more precisely, you might scratch your head at this question given my unit testing expertise.  A company brought me in to teach developers to write automated unit testing and someone is asking me a term loosely associated the QA group.  What gives?

But in fact, this really just begs the question, “what is a test case?”  And why might it vary depending on who writes it and how?

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