A few months ago I was visiting a client who was having a lot of problems using TDD.“It takes over half an hour to run our unit tests,” he said.“You are not doing TDD,” I said. “In order for tests to be valuable all of them must run fast—within a few seconds, or developers will stop running tests frequently.”“But how to I make them run fast?” he asked, “Just connecting to the database takes 30 seconds”So I showed him a technique called Dependency Injections that allowed him to insert a mock object instead of the database. â€...

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?Below ...

Over the years, I’ve come to hold some strong. opinions on testing, testers and the entire business of quality assurance. Inspired by this post on Facebook’s testing, I wanted to write this down so I can point people to it. Some of this is controversial. In fact, even mentioning some of this in conversation has caused people to flip the bozo bit on me.Most product teams don’t need a separate testing role. And even if they do, the ratio of full time dev:full time test should be in the order of >20:1. For evidence, look no further than some of the most successful engineer...

The office life has changed a lot since the beginning of the 21st century. Nowadays, technologies have taken over a large part of the work that people have to do, inside their walls. Some of them are more important than others, though. Here are four that no company should live without. A VoIP Phone SystemIf a company wants to communicate with its clients, it needs to install a centralized phone system. The old ones were complicated and costly. The more phone lines you had, the higher the monthly bill got. Today, VoIP phone systems have replaced the traditional ones, bringing in an era of ...

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of organizations which don’t employ them.  There are many, many shops that do big bang testi...

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. And that actually goes for more than just their monetization plans and feature sets. Elite is a tradit...

In preparation for a recent team offsite, I spent some time thinking about what I hold dear as a software developer. One idea I kept coming back to is the notion of balance. I see balance manifesting itself several ways in the work of a successful developer, some of which follow.Speed Versus QualityThe most obvious example is the balance of development speed and quality. When building software, it’s never a good idea to write code as fast as possible without any attention toward maintainability, just as it’s never a good idea to spend such an inordinate amount of time designing a...

Logs crop up all over the place. They are generated by everything from web servers and databases to the firewalls which protect them from breaches.Because logs accumulate in large volumes from all of these different sources, log aggregation is an important process which works to organize and impose order over otherwise disparate log files.That sounds good, but should your online business be eager to jump on the log aggregation bandwagon? Here is a look at the main benefits and considerations to help you decide.Image Source: PixabayThe importance of log aggregationAs mentioned, a laundry list o...