In my post on “Being Prepared”, I wrote about the need for us to practice our craft in order to deliver high quality code. Unfortunately, there are a lot of demands for our time working on projects that are under tight deadlines and supporting existing software in production. One of the ways to escape the…
Do you actively monitor your applications? Chances are that if your development team doesn’t, your operations group does. There are a variety of metrics that they are watching at a high level like CPU and memory usage performance counters and whether or not your applications and services are up or down. These help them to…
Have you ever had this experience before? I drove up to a Chase ATM to transfer money from my Liquid account (re-loadable debit card we use for budgeting purposes) to our main checking account. (I know – it would be nice if I could just transfer this stuff online. Unfortunately, the Liquid account does not…
It happens every once in a while. I waltz into the classroom looking forward to a new lesson and suddenly realize that today is the final exam. Everything I should have been preparing for is finally due. And I haven’t done anything — no flash cards, no notes, no readings, no late night, caffeine-infested sessions…
Is creating readable code an important feature of writing quality software? Is it something that you would mention when reviewing code for one of your team members? Typically, when we review code we focus on making sure that: It does what it is supposed to do It handles potential failures It avoids duplication It performs…
Raise your hand if you have seen this before in your development or production error logs. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. As you might have guessed, this is informing us that we are calling a method or property on an object that is currently null. The stack trace might…
What would you say if I asked you what are the marks of high quality software? Would you have answered, “a really nice/slick/sexy user interface?” Or perhaps you would have said, “absence of known defects or bugs.” Those in the TDD camp might have replied, “thoroughly tested and validated with automation.” Or an architect might…
In my last post, I shared with you the reasons why I wanted to start a new blog. However, I forgot to mention that the major impetus for grabbing the qualitysoftwarematters.com domain name came from my participation in a free blogging course provided by John Sonmez of simpleprogrammer.com. If you haven’t heard of him, you…
I have currently been working on creating a system-level, feature test for some functionality that our company is developing to allow hospitals and health care providers to request a batch of eligibility requests for patients using a combination of Visual Studio 2012, SpecFlow 1.8 and FluentAssertions. In doing so, I ran into the problem of…