No Huddle Offense

Thoughts on Integration

In the last weeks I have heard the following sentence more often: "Everybody who has done a software project knows that integration and development isn’t easy". This statement of does not make sense to me. Seems like a lame excuse which implies that all software projects need to be off schedule and integration is hard when putting software together.Which is not the case I think. There are very successful projects around. And they also face the "integration problem".

So this statement does not need to be true when doing it right (my own opinion and experience though :-)). Especially with all the tools, books and information available. I think this is even right for highly distributed software projects where the partners a scattered around the world. Yes we can do it right 🙂

P.S. I know a lot of links in there, but worth to follow (this is seemless self promotion :-))

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Redefining the 'I' in IDE

An great talk from Mik Kersten from Tasktop (You might know him from Mylyn) @ W-JAX conference – it is about productivity and topics surrounding it:

The video can be found here.

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Are you a developer? Have you read these books?

So you are a software developer? The next list is a set of books which I would recommend to read 🙂 Might not be complete so feel free to add some more!

CodeCraft – Pete Goodliffe
Beautiful Code – Andy Oram; Greg Wilson
Code Complete – Steve McConnell
The Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
The Mythical Man Month – Frederick P. Brooks
The Productive Programmer – Neil Ford
Practical Development Environments – Matthew Doar
Head First Design Patterns – Eric, Elisabeth Freeman
The Art of Agile Development – James Shore, Shane Warden
Managing Software Requirements – Dean Leffingwell, Don Widrig
Managing Iterative Software Development Projects – Kurt Bittner, Ian Spence
Refactoring – Martin Fowler
Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-Based Software – Jerry Zeyu Gao
A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software – John D. McGregor, David A. Sykes

Beside all these nice books there are plenty of other books around which are great. For example books about programming languages, getting things done, presentations, etc…So grap a book and start to read 🙂 In my opinion good code quality starts with the developer. And a developer who is informed, up-to-date and knows what he is doing writes quality code!

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Clean Code – book review

The book "Clean code" from Robert C. Martin has the subtitle: "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship". It comes up with some nice ideas. Many of them you might know, but hidden in the book are some other ideas. Overall it’s well written and easy to read. And compared to the book "Code Craft" much thinner so faster to read (Although Code Craft is a very good book, and a must read for prgrammers!). Overall a nice book if you want to get into the idea of writting quality code.

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Inspecting the integrity of your source code.

Software projects grow over time. They get bigger, more stuff is added, patches added and bugs fixed. New features added, and removed and code removed. But who keeps track of the changes and ensures that your source code repository stays clean? That they are no old undeleted files, no missing unittest, that all dependecies are correct? In short: that they are no broken windows (link) and a nice clean environment a engineer can checkout, compile and run within minutes? 

I’m using the ReInCheck tool for that. Currently it is customized to support a multi module maven project which consists of OSGi bundles. But it should be easy to adopt it to your needs.

Categories: Personal • Tags: OSGi, Python, Software Engineering • Permalink for this article