DaedTech

Stories about Software

Apr
4

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The Relationship between Static Analysis and Continuous Testing

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 give it a try.

As an adult, I have learned that I have an introvert type personality.  I do alright socially, don’t mind public speaking, and do not (I don’t think) present as an awkward person.  So, learning about this characterization surprised me somewhat, but only until I fully understood.

I won’t delve into the finer points of human psychology here, but suffice it to say that introverts prefer to process and grok questions before responding.  This describes me to a tee.  However, working as a consultant and giving frequent advice clashes with this and has forced me to develop somewhat of a knack for answering extemporaneously.  Still, you might ask me just the right question to cause me to cock my head, blink at you, and frown.

I received just such a question the other day.  The question, more or less, was, “if we have continuous testing, do we really need static analysis?”  And, just like that, I was stumped.  This didn’t square, and I wanted time to think on that.  Luckily, I’ve had a bit of time.  (This is why I love blogging.)

Continuous Testing, Defined

Before we go into the relationship between the concepts, let’s first clarify them.  That way we’ll have no inadvertent misunderstandings via buzz word.

My first introduction to continuous testing was through a tool called NCrunch.  It bills itself as an “automated concurrent testing tool,” which certainly offers more precision than “continuous testing.”  NCrunch is awesome.  If you practice TDD or have unit tests, give it a look.  It runs your tests continuously as you write code, providing you real-time, in-IDE, visual feedback as you make changes.  Accidentally delete a line and watch the side of your editor window go immediately red.

In the interceding years, I have seen a broadening of this term to be a follower for concepts such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD).  In agile environments, we integrate constantly and, ideally, deploy (somewhere) constantly.  Why give testing short shrift?  With continuous testing, your environments constantly pepper your build candidates with runtime tests, providing early feedback instead of near the end of the sprint.

So we have two concepts that we can generalize.  The first concept involves tightening the unit test feedback loop, while the second involves the same for integration and acceptance tests.  In both cases, we consistently test our code’s runtime behavior with a fast-feedback loop.

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Mar
23

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How to Perform Effective Team Code Reviews

Category: .NET 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, check out all of the new tech debt-related features in the newest version of NDepend.

I’ve heard people say (paraphrased) that teams succeed uniformly, but fail each in its own unique way.  While I might argue the veracity of this statement, it evokes an interesting image.  Many roads, lined with many decisions, lead to many different sorts of failures.

Code review presents no exception.  Teams can fail at code review in myriad, unique ways.  And, on top of that, many paths to broader failure can involve poor code reviews (doubtless among other things).

How can I assign such importance to the code review?  After all, many would consider this an ancillary team activity and one with only upside.  Done poorly, code review catches no defects.  Done well, it catches some defects.  Right?

How Code Review Can Go Wrong

Simply put, code review can have worse than zero effect.  Ineffectual code review suffers mainly the opportunity cost of the participants’ time.  But toxic code review creates morale problems, counterproductive team dynamics, and damaging distractions.

So the first order of business is to avoid a net negative effect.  To do this, one simply has to remove the potential of toxic culture from the process of code review.  Of course, that’s a bit easier said than done, but a lot of it just means following basic rules of human decency.  Start by treating one another with respect.  Then ensure that all participants feel comfortable getting and receiving feedback.  Enlist the help of even-tempered, charismatic folks to lead by example.

Once you’ve insulated yourself against the most damaging effects, it’s time to guard against ineffectual code reviews.  It is toward that end that I’ll be focusing for the remainder of this post.  Ineffectual code reviews can ways time, as I mentioned earlier.  But they can also create a false sense of security and lead to poor choices.

So what makes code review effective?  How can your team get the most out of this activity?  I’ll offer some thoughts based on firsthand experience across a wide number of organizations.

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Mar
9

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Considering a Port to .NET Core? Use NDepend

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, take a look at the latest version of NDepend, with extensive features around technical debt measurement.

An American colloquialism holds, “only two things are certain: death and taxes.”  If I had to appropriate that for the software industry, I might say that the two certainties are death and legacy code.  Inevitably, you have code that you have had for a while, and you want to do things with it.

Software architects typically find themselves tasked with such considerations.  Oh, sure, sometimes they get to pick techs and frameworks for greenfield development.  Sometimes they get to draw fancy diagrams and lay out plans.  But frequently, life charges them with the more mundane task of “figuring out how to make that creaky old application run on an iPhone.”  Okay, maybe it’s not quite that silly, but you get the idea.

If you earn a living as an architect in the .NET world, you have, no doubt, contemplated the impact of .NET Core on your application portfolio.  Even if you have no active plans to migrate, this evolution of .NET should inform your strategic decisions going forward.  But if you have use for deploying the framework along with your application or if you want to run on different operating systems, you’re going to need to port that legacy code.

I am, by no means, an expert in .NET Core.  Instead, my areas of specialty lie in code analysis, developer training, and IT management and strategy consulting.  I help dev teams create solutions economically.  And because of this, I can recognize the value of NDepend to a port from what I do know about .NET core.

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Feb
21

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How to Get Coding Standards Right (and Wrong)

Category: Language Agnostic Tags: , | 23 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 give it a try!

Nothing compares with the first week on a new job or team.  You experience an interesting swirl of anticipation, excitement, novelty, nervousness, and probably various other emotions I’m forgetting.  What will your new life be like?  How can you impress your teammates?  Where do you get a cup of coffee around here?

If you write code for a living, you know some specific new job peculiarities.  Do they have a machine with runnable code ready on day one?  Or do you have to go through some protracted onboarding process before you can even look at code?  And speaking of code, does theirs square with elegant use of design patterns and unit testing that they advertised during the interview process?  Or does it look like someone made a Death Star out of bailing wire and glue?

But one of the most pivotal moments (for me, anyway) comes innocuously enough.  It usually happens with an offhand comment from a senior developer or through something mentioned in your orientation packet.  You find yourself directed to the coding standards document.  Oh, boy.

At this point, I start to wonder.  Will I find myself glancing at a one-pager that says, “follow the Microsoft guidelines whenever possible and only include one class per file?”  Or, will I find something far more sinister?  Images of a power-mad architect with a gleam in his eye and a convoluted variable name encoding scheme in his back pocket pop into my head.  Will I therefore spend the next six months waging pitched battles over the placement of underscores?

Ugh, Coding Standards

In this post, believe it or not, I’m going to make the case for coding standards.  But before I do so, I want to make my skepticism very clear.  Accordingly, I want to talk first about how coding standards fail.

Based on personal battle scars and my own experience, I tend to judge coding standard documents as guilty until proven innocent.  I cannot tell you how many groups I have encountered where a coding standard was drafted, “just because.”  In fact, I’ve even written about this in the past.

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Feb
19

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Keep Your Codebase Fit with Trend Metrics

Category: .NET Tags: |

Editorial Note: Thanks to everyone who voted for a Developer Hegemony Cover.  I’ll tabulate the official results soon, but it looks like the dark cover is the clear favorite!

Second 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 new version of NDepend.

A while back, I wrote a post about the importance of trends when discussing code metrics.  Metrics have impact when teams are first exposed to them, but that tends to fade with time.  Context and trend monitoring create and sustain a sense of urgency.

To understand what I mean, imagine a person aware that he has put on some weight over the years.  One day, he steps on a scale, and realizes that he’s much heavier than previously thought.  That induces a moment of shock and, no doubt, grand plans for gyms, diets, and lifestyle adjustments.  But, as time passes, his attitude may shift to one in which the new, heavier weight defines his self-conception.  The weight metric loses its impact.

To avoid this, he needs to continue measuring himself.  He may see himself gaining further weight, poking a hole in the illusion that he has evened out.  Or, conversely, he may see that small adjustments have helped him lose weight, and be encouraged to continue with those adjustments.  In either case, his ongoing conception of progress, more than the actual weight metric, drives and motivates behaviors.

The same holds true with codebases and keeping them clean.  All too often, I see organizations run some sort of static analysis or linting tool on their codebase, and conclude “it’s bad.”  They resolve only to do a better job in a year or two, when the rewrite will start.  However good or bad any given figure might be, the trend-line, and not the figure itself, holds the most significance.

Trend Metrics with NDepend

In that last post, I touched only on the topic, but not the specifics.  Here, I’d like to speak to how NDepend helps you with metrics.  I suspect that a lot of people know NDepend for its memorable visualization aids and its code rules and queries.  I don’t see as much discussion about the valuable trend tools, perhaps because they were release comparably recently.  In either case, I want to talk today about those tools.

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