DaedTech

Stories about Software

Aug
22

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Are Code Rules Meant to Be Broken?

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , | 4 Comments

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 at the NDepend’s code rules.  Interested in me writing for your site?  Get in touch through our content marketing business.

If you’ve never seen the movie Footloose, I can’t honestly say I recommend it.  If your tastes run similarly to mine, you’ll find it somewhat over the top.

A boy from the big city moves to a quiet country town.  Once there, he finds that the town council, filled with local curmudgeons, has outlawed rock music and dancing.  So follows a predictable sequence of events as the boy tries to win his new town over and to convince them of the importance of free expression.  You can probably hear his voice saying, “come on, Mr. Uptighterton, rules are made to be broken!”

Today, I’d like to explore a bit the theme of rules and breaking them.  But I’ll move it from a boy teaching the people from American Gothic to dance and into the software development shop and to rules around a codebase.

Perhaps you’ve experienced something similarly, comically oppressive in your travels.  A power mad architect with a crazy inheritance framework.  A team lead that lectures endlessly about the finer points of Hungarian notation.  Maybe you’ve wanted to grab your fellow team members by the shirt collars, shake them, and shout, “go on, leave the trailing underscore off the class field name!”

If so, then I sympathize and empathize.  Soul crushing shops do exist, seeking to break the spirits of all working there.  In such places, rule breaking might help if only to shake people out of learned helplessness and depression.  But I’m going to examine some relatively normal situations and explore the role of rules for a software team.

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Aug
21

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How You’re Probably Misunderstanding TDD

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , | 17 Comments

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the TechTown blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look around at their training courses.  

Let’s get something out of the way right up front.  You might have extensive experience with test driven development (TDD).  You might even practice it routinely and wear the red-green-refactor cadence like a comfortable work glove.  For all I know, you could be a bonafide TDD expert.

If any of that describes you, then you probably don’t actually misunderstand TDD.  Not surprisingly, people that become adept with it, live, and breathe it tend to get it.  But if that introductory paragraph doesn’t describe you, then you probably have some misconceptions.

I earn my living doing a combination of training and consulting.  This affords me the opportunity to visit a lot of shops and talk to a lot of people.  And during the course of these visits and talks, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon.  Ask people why they choose not to use TDD, and you rarely hear a frank, “I haven’t learned how.”

Instead, you tend to hear dismissals of the practice.  And these dismissals generally arise not from practiced familiarity, but from misunderstanding TDD.  While I can’t discount the possibility, I can say that I’ve never personally witnessed someone demonstrate an expert understanding of the practice while also dismissing its value.  Rather, they base the dismissal on misconception.

So if you’ve decided up-front that TDD isn’t for you, first be sure you’re not falling victim to one of these misunderstandings.

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Aug
16

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Integrating APM into Your Testing Strategy

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , |

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the Stackify blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at their tooling to help you with your APM needs.

Does your team have a testing strategy?  In 2017, I have a hard time imagining that wouldn’t at least have some kind of strategy, however rudimentary.  Unlike a couple of decades ago, you hear less and less about people just changing code on the production server and hoping for the best.

At the very least, you probably have a QA group, or at least someone who serves in that role prior to shipping your software.  You write the code, do something to test it, and then ship it once the testers bless it (or at least notate “known issues”).

From there, things probably run the gamut among those of you reading.  Some of you probably do what I’ve described and little more.  Some of you probably have multiple pre-production environments to which a continuous integration setup automatically deploys builds.  Of course, it only deploys those builds assuming all automated unit, integration and smoke tests pass and assuming that your static analysis doesn’t flag any show stopper issues.  Once deployed, a team of highly skilled testers perform exploratory testing.  Or, maybe, you do something somewhere in between.

But, whatever you do, you can always do more.  In fact, I encourage you always to look for new ways to test.  And today I’d like to talk about an idea for just such a thing.  Specifically, I think you can leverage application performance management (APM) software to help your testing efforts.  I say this in spite of the fact that most shops have traditionally taken advantage of these tools only in production.

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Aug
9

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How to Evaluate Software Quality from the Outside In

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , | 4 Comments

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the Stackify blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, take a look at Prefix and Retrace, for all of your prod support needs.

In a sense, application code serves as the great organizational equalizer.  Large or small, complex or simple, enterprise or startup, all organizations with in-house software wrangle with similar issues.  Oh, don’t misunderstand.  I realize that some shops write web apps, others mobile apps, and still others hodgepodge line of business software.  But when you peel away domain, interaction, and delivery mechanism, software is, well, software.

And so I find myself having similar conversations with a wide variety of people, in a wide variety of organizations.  I should probably explain just a bit about myself.  I work as an independent IT management consultant.  But these days, I have a very specific specialty.  Companies call me to do custom static analysis on their codebases or application portfolios, and then to present the findings to leadership as the basis for important strategic decisions.

As a simple example, imagine a CIO contemplating the fate of a 10 year old Java codebase.  She might call me and ask, “should I evolve this to meet our upcoming needs, or would starting from scratch prove more cost effective in the long run.”  I would then do an assessment where I treated the code as data and quantified things like dependence on outdated libraries (as an over-simplified example).  From there, I’d present a quantitatively-driven recommendation.

So you can probably imagine how I might call code a great equalizer.  It may do different things, but it has common structural, underpinnings that I can quantify.  When I show up, it also has another commonality.  Something about it prompts the business to feel dissatisfied.  I only get calls when the business has experienced bad outcomes as measured by software quality from the outside in.

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Aug
8

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What is Real User Monitoring?

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , , |

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the Monitis blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look around at their assortment of monitoring solutions.

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “real user monitoring” in passing.  Our industry generates no shortage of buzzwords, many of the them vague and context dependent.  So you could be forgiven for scratching your head at this term.

Let’s go through it in some detail, in order to provide clarity.  But to do that, I’m going to walk you through the evolution of circumstance that created a demand for real user monitoring.  You can most easily understand a solution by first understanding the problem that it solves.

A Budding Entrepreneur’s Website

Let’s say that the entrepreneurial bug bites you.  You decide to build some kind of software as a service (SaaS) product.  Obviously, you need some time to build it and make it production ready, so you pick a target go-live date months from now.

But you know enough about marketing to know that you should start building hype now.  So, you put together a WordPress site and start a blog, looking to build a following.  Then, excited to get going, you make a series of post.

And then, nothing.  I mean, you didn’t expect to hit the top of Hacker News, but you expected… something.  No one comments on social media or emails you to congratulate you or anything at all.

Frustrated, you decide to add a commenting plugin and some social media share buttons.  This, you reason, will provide a lower friction means of offering feedback.  And still, absolutely nothing.  Now you begin to wonder if your host provider hasn’t played a cruel trick on you in which it only serves the site when you visit.

The Deafening Lack of Feedback

If perhaps it sounds like I empathize, that’s because I sincerely do.  Years and years ago when I started my first blog, I posted into the ether.  I had no idea if anyone read those early posts.  Of course, I was just having a good time putting my opinions out there and not trying to make a living, so I didn’t worry.  But nevertheless, I eventually felt frustrated.

The frustration arises from a lack of feedback.  You take some actions and then have no ability to see what affect they have.  Sure, you can see the post go live in your browser, but are you reaching anyone?  Has a single person read the post?  Or have thousands read the post and found it boring?  It’s like writing some code, but you’re required to hand it off to someone else to compile, run, and observe.  You feel blind.

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