Technology Related Classic Mistakes

In my last blog I looked a Product Related Classic Mistakes from Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell, which although it’s now been around for at least 10 years, and times have changed, is still as relevant today as when it was written.

Product Related Classic Mistakes

In my last blog I looked a Process Related Classic Mistakes from Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell, which although it’s now been around for at least 10 years, and times have changed, is still as relevant today as when it was written.

As Steve’s book states, classic mistakes are classic mistakes because they’re mistakes that are made so often and by so many people. They have predictably bad results and, when you know them, they stick out like a sore thumb and the idea behind listing them here is that, once you know them, you can spot them and hopefully do something to remedy their effect.

Process Related Classic Mistakes

In my last blog I looked a People Related Classic Mistakes from Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell, which although it’s now been around for at least 10 years, and times have changed, is still as relevant today as when it was written.

People Related Classic Mistakes

In my last blog I mentioned Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell, which although has now been around for at least 10 years is still as relevant today as when it was written. One of my favourite parts of the book was his treatment of Classic Mistakes

Stuck with the The Inner Platform Anti-pattern?

Just recently our team has received some innocuous requests from the customers: “please can we have a configurable menu here?” or “...this would save us a lot of time”. These, on the face of it, should have been extremely easy to code, but have turned out to be a real nightmare. At first, I put this down to the massive technical debt¹ of the legacy code we’ve inherited, but more recently, after a comment from a colleague, I’ve come to realise that it’s more than that.

Summary of Testing Techniques Blogs

As I’ve just about come to the end of my series of blogs on testing techniques, today’s blog lists for review purposes my nine blogs on this subject so far - there may be more...

Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 P2: Administration Essentials

I was recently asked to review Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 P2: Administration Essentials by Michel Schildmeijer and I was some what apprehensive at first. After all, my blog is about Java development; a personal notebook detailing stuff I need to know, plus... this was a book on Weblogic Server administration.

Then it struck me that, as a developer, how many times I’ve had to configure a server of some kind, be it Weblogic, Tomcat, JBoss or Glassfish. And, every time I do configure a server, I’ve often thought how great it would be to have a handy, succinct, easy to read guide available to ensure that I’m doing it right and I now think I have my book for configuring Weblogic.

Some Definitions - Testing Techniques 9

I think that I’m coming to the end of my series of blogs on testing techniques, and it feels like it’s been along haul. One of the things that has become clearer to me is that approaches to testing are still in their infancy and as such are a definite source of contention or discussion amongst developers - and that’s a good thing. I suspect that we are at a point in the history of our profession where the discipline of writing tests is only just gaining ground and will one day be common place and taught as part of elementary programming classes¹. Today’s blog provides a summary of the of the terms used in my previous blogs in this series.

Why You Should Write Unit Tests - Testing Techniques 8

I’ve had lots of reaction to my recent blog on ‘What you Should Test’, some agreeing with me for varying reasons and others thinking that I’m totally dangerous for suggesting that certain classes may not need unit tests. Having dealt with What to test, today’s blog deals with Why you should write unit tests, and today’s example code is based upon a true story: only names, dates and facts have been changed.

More on Creating Stubs for Legacy Code - Testing Techniques 7

In my last blog, I talked about dealing with the badly behaved untestable₁ SitePropertiesManager class and how to create stubs by extracting an interface. But what happens when you don’t have access to the source code of the legacy class because it’s locked away inside a third party JAR file?