Let’s say that you have some public facing method as part of an API: public void Process(CustomerOrder order) { //Whatever } CustomerOrder is something that you don’t control but that you do have to use. Life is good, but then let’s say that a requirement comes in saying that orders can now be post-dated, so…
One of the peculiar ironies that I’ve discovered by watching the way a lot of different software shops work is that the most intense moments of exuberance about software seem to occur in places where software development happens at glacial speeds. If you walk into an agile shop or a startup or some kind of…
This is a post that I’ve had in my drafts folder for nearly two years. Well, I should say I’ve had the title and a few haphazard notes in my drafts folder for nearly two years; I’m writing the actual post right now. The reason I’ve had it sitting around for so long is twofold:…
A while back, I found myself plugged into working on a rather large .NET project. The project had been going on for a while, and I was helping out only in terms of implementation manpower; architectural decisions had long since been made. And, in fact, some of the architectural decisions had pre-dated the project altogether….
Building Bad Software is Like Building a Tower A little over a year ago, I wrote a post explaining how you can use the metaphor, “building software is like building a tower” to help you write bad software. The idea was that building something like a skyscraper requires insane amounts of planning because the actual…
