I recently started writing my fourth book, “Mastering Software Engineering in C++”. This led me into asking a fundamental question: what is really software engineering? You may find the answer surprising. Here’s the video: If you have any questions on comments, please don’t hesitate to post them below.
In this article, I will present a method that I’ve tried in a few codebases in compiled languages for safely and quickly refactoring untested code. First, we will discuss the main problem we are trying to solve, quickly introduce the techniques coined by Michael Feathers, then discuss some shortcomings of the existing techniques, and finally... Read more
Evolutionary Design is the practice of growing a system in a natural way, by adding the minimum amount of code to satisfy the business needs in an iterative and incremental approach. When done right, the code structure changes continuously to optimize for change, thus allowing a constant speed of development for longer periods of time. In... Read more
Let’s be honest, we do not treat frontend code the same way we treat backend code. And it shows. We talk about applying rules of clean code, about keeping it simple, about writing unit tests. Yet, when it comes to writing frontend code, we skip all those rules that we usually self impose. We convinced... Read more
This article has first appeared in Today Software Magazine. Why Spock? When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we... Read more
One way of learning new things about your coding style and about yourself is by doing a daily code kata. It can be like a simulation of a year-long software development project, with all the ups and downs happening in a much shorter time scale (a few iterations). More on that below. I encourage you... Read more
This is a guest post by Andrey Adamovich The first time, I gave a talk titled “Enterprise flight into DevOps space”, was in late 2014 at DevConFu conference. After that, I have delivered the presentation several times during 2015 at various conferences in Europe. For some time, I considered that a “closed topic” and did not... Read more
One of the dangers of writing user stories is that they can get pretty big if there’s no one on the team to point it out. The scope of a user story becomes broader than it should be. In the following article, I’m going to walk you through the reasons why you should aim for... Read more
The post was first published in Today Software Magazine, no. 55 This article aims to answer a set of core questions about software architecture, providing answers that come from modern software architecture thinking. Its inspiration came from: conversations with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Simon Brown architecting the eventrix.co product, running “Architectural Katas” countless conversations with architects... Read more
We are committed to champion software excellence and challenge the current practices. Our aim is to constantly improve: business, product, and teams. That’s why, in this last month we carefully selected pieces of advice, practical ideas for you & your team to improve and grow. For you to easier access them, we present you the... Read more
Over the past 6 months, I’ve been working with a customer who develops hardware appliances. They were facing a challenge with complaints from users about one of their products, which appeared a few months in. Needless to say, the cause of such bugs requires long and thorough investigation. Context The hardware appliance runs a real-time OS, which... Read more
Challenge the way you work. Stay happy & productive! The journey to mastery is never done. It takes practice, constant improvement and always honing your craft to achieve your fullest potential. After sharing useful methods for the Scrum Master and the Product Owner | Business Analyst | Product Manager roles, let’s explore together the Software Developer | Software Crafter role. This time we’ll focus on technical and... Read more
While a lot of the design principles that we use in software can be found in other design disciplines, there is one very present in UX and graphical design that is very rarely discussed in software circles: consistency. It’s not because we weren’t trying. The system metaphor idea from XP and the conceptual integrity idea... Read more
This article was published first in Today Software Magazine, no 16. Below it’s the full version. The authors are Alexandru Bolboaca and Adrian Bolboaca. In 2001, a group of people unpleased about the state of software development gathered in a mountain ski resort from Utah. One thing leading to another, they started discussing about the industrial methods applied at the... Read more
This article was first published in Today Software Magazine, no 12. Below it’s the full version. The authors are: Alexandru Bolboaca and Adrian Bolboaca. The Problem Imagine the following situation: a team has developed for 6 months a great product that immediately sells. Users show their passion for the product by asking new features. If the team does not deliver the new features... Read more
A simplistic idea started spreading for the past years in Romania, and I’ve met it to a lower extent in other European countries as France, Germany, UK, etc. Companies noticed they have a developer crisis. The simplistic solution: the universities and the industry should produce more developers. I believe this solution to be completely off... Read more
The past couple of weeks have shown that Usable Software Design is an interesting topic to many people. From exploring it, to exchanging ideas and even applying the principles behind it, I think we live very interesting times. Here’s a brief account on what happened: Johan Martinsson applied the principles of Usable Software Design with... Read more
Images from Impossible Objects Catalog, based on Impossible Objects by Jacques Carelman My previous blog posts have shown how to create better software design and defined the idea of Usable Software Design. Usable Software Design comes from the simple observation that the developer is the user of a software design. My thesis is that using... Read more
Software design is all the rage now. It looks like every year a few more design ideas appear. First there were the GoF design patterns. Now, MVC is the way to do web applications, while ideas like: domain driven design, ports and adapters, microservices see increase interest and adoption. I learned software design by doing,... Read more
Every week, me and Claudia discover 2-3 potential bugs in the product we are developing during our code review sessions. This happens despite a very structured way of work and despite applying ATDD and Test First / TDD. Yet developers and technical leads complain to me in the community or during coaching sessions and workshops... Read more
