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Stories about Software

May
17

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How to Scale Your Static Analysis Tooling

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , | 2 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, download NDepend and have a look at the tech debt forecasting features in the latest version.

If you wander the halls of a large company with a large software development organization, you will find plenty of examples of practice and process at scale.  When you see this sort of thing, it has generally come about in one of two ways.  First, the company piloted a new practice with a team or two and then scaled it from there.  Or, second, the development organization started the practice when it was small and grew it as the department grew.

But what about “rolled it out all at once?”  Nah, (mercifully) not so much.  “Let’s take this thing we’ve never tried before, deploy it in an expensive roll out, and assume all will go well.”  Does that sound like the kind of plan executives with career concerns sign off on?  Would you sign off on it?  Even the pointiest haired of managers would feel gun shy.

When it comes to scaling a static analysis practice, you will find no exception.  Invariably, organizations grow the practice as they grow, or they pilot it and then scale it up.  And that begs the question of, “how?” when it comes to scaling static analysis.

Two main areas of concern come to mind: technical and human.  You probably think I’ll spend most of the post talking technical don’t you?  Nope.  First of all, too many tools, setups, and variations exist for me to scratch the surface.  But secondly, and more importantly, a key person that I’ll mention below will take the lead for you on this.

Instead, I’ll focus on the human element.  Or, more specifically, I will focus on the process for scaling your static analysis — a process involving humans.

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May
16

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Customizing Generated Method Header Comments

Category: .NET Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

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, the subject of this post.

Last month, I wrote a post introducing you to T4 templates.  Near the end, I included a mention of GhostDoc’s use of T4 templates in automatically generating code comments.  Today, I’d like to expand on that.

To recap very briefly, recall that Ghost Doc allows you to generate things like method header comments.  I recommend that, in most cases, you let it do its thing.  It does a good job.  But sometimes, you might have occasion to want to tweak the result.  And you can do that by making use of T4 Templates.

Documenting Chess TDD

To demonstrate, let’s revisit my trusty toy code base, Chess TDD.  Because I put this code together for instructional purposes and not to release as a product, it has no method header comments for Intellisense’s benefit.  This makes it the perfect candidate for a demonstration.

If I had released this as a library, I’d have started the documentation with the Board class.  Most of the client interaction would happen via Board, so let’s document that.  It offers you a constructor and a bunch of semantics around placing and moving pieces.  Let’s document the conceptually simple “MovePiece” method.

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May
14

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How Much Code Should My Developers Be Responsible For?

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, download NDepend and see if your code manages to avoid the dreaded zone of pain.

As I work with more and more organizations, my compiled list of interesting questions grows.  Seriously – I have quite the backlog.  And I don’t mean interesting in the pejorative sense.  You know – the way you say, “oh, that’s… interesting” after some drunken family member rants about their political views.

Rather, these questions interest me at a philosophical level.  They make me wonder about things I never might have pondered.  Today, I’ll pull one out and dust it off.  A client asked me this once, a while back.  They were wondering, “how much code should my developers be responsible for?”

Why ask about this?  Well, they had a laudable enough goal.  They had a fairly hefty legacy codebase and didn’t want to overtax the folks working on it.  “We know our codebase has X lines of code, so how many developers comprise an ideally staffed team?”

In a data-driven way, they asked a great question.  And yet, the reasoning falls apart on closer inspection.  I’ll speak today about why that happens.  Here are some problems with this thinking.

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May
11

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CodeIt.Right Rules, Explained

Category: .NET Tags: , , | 2 Comments

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, an automated Code Review tool.

I’ve heard tell of a social experiment conducted with monkeys.  It may or may not be apocryphal, but it illustrates an interesting point.  So, here goes.

Primates and Conformity

A group of monkeys inhabited a large enclosure, which included a platform in the middle, accessible by a ladder.  For the experiment, their keepers set a banana on the platform, but with a catch.  Anytime a monkey would climb to the platform, the action would trigger a mechanism that sprayed the entire cage with freezing cold water.

The smarter monkeys quickly figured out the correlation and actively sought to prevent their cohorts from triggering the spray.  Anytime a monkey attempted to climb the ladder, they would stop it and beat it up a bit by way of teaching a lesson.  But the experiment wasn’t finished.

Once the behavior had been established, they began swapping out monkeys.  When a newcomer arrived on the scene, he would go for the banana, not knowing the social rules of the cage.  The monkeys would quickly teach him, though.  This continued until they had rotated out all original monkeys.  The monkeys in the cage would beat up the newcomers even though they had never experienced the actual negative consequences.

Now before you think to yourself, “stupid monkeys,” ask yourself how much better you’d fare.  This video shows that humans have the same instincts as our primate cousins.

Static Analysis and Conformity

You might find yourself wondering why I told you this story.  What does it have to do with software tooling and static analysis?

Well, I find that teams tend to exhibit two common anti-patterns when it comes to static analysis.  Most prominently, they tune out warnings without due diligence.  After that, I most frequently see them blindly implement the suggestions.

I tend to follow two rules when it comes to my interaction with static analysis tooling.

  • Never implement a suggested fix without knowing what makes it a fix.
  • Never ignore a suggested fix without understanding what makes it a fix.

You syllogism buffs out there have, no doubt, condensed this to a single rule.  Anytime you encounter a suggested fix you don’t understand, go learn about it.

Once you understand it, you can implement the fix or ignore the suggestion with eyes wide open.  In software design/architecture, we deal with few clear cut rules and endless trade-offs.  But you can’t speak intelligently about the trade-offs without knowing the theory behind them.

Toward that end, I’d like to facilitate that warning for some CodeIt.Right rules today.  Hopefully this helps you leverage your tooling to its full benefit.

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May
10

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Entering the Zone of Pain

Category: .NET 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, download NDepend and see if your code falls into the infamous Zone of Pain.

Years ago, when I first downloaded a trial of NDepend, I chuckled when I saw the “Abstractness vs. Instability” graph.  The concept itself does not amuse, obviously.  Rather, the labels for the corners of the graph provide the levity: “zone of uselessness” and “zone of pain.”

When you run NDepend analysis and reporting on your codebase, it generates this graph.  You can then see whether or not each of your assemblies falls within one of these two dubious zones.  No doubt people with NDepend experience can recall seeing a particularly hairy assembly depicted in the zone of pain and thinking, “I knew it!”

But whether you have experienced this or not, you should stop to consider what it means to enter the zone of pain.  The term amuses, but it also informs.  Yes, these assemblies will tend to annoy developers.  But they also create expensive, risky churn inside of your applications and raise the cost of ownership of the codebase.

Because this presents a real problem, let’s take a look at what, exactly, lands you in the zone of pain and how to recover.

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