Skip to content

Programming The New Web, Day 3

Code Quality, Mentoring, Enterprise Software Management, and mixing Java and .Net carried the day. The format we adapted today was excellent for these topics; we went in roundtable fashion and each participant shared what they do to ensure quality and mentor. After hearing Ben Geyer talk about XRadar, I definitely have to get that set up on my projects at the client site. Someone mentioned the idea of “a build breakage is a line stoppage”; I think it may have been Andrew Moore. That was an interesting concept and hearing how it was carried out in Andrew’s instance was beneficial. Here are the points I shared about quality:

In my consulting/development work

  • Reiterating the “sign your work” principle of Pragmatic Programming
  • Discipline as a necessary quality; the ability to do what is required for good software yet isn’t fun, intriguing, or stimulating to a narrow attention span
  • Use a world-readable version control repository
  • Publish the Javadoc and unit test reports to the project website
  • Use Checkstyle to enforce conventions
  • Use peer reviews for code releases that push to production
  • Solid unit/integration/functional testing

This was probably the most public setting where I have shared my observation on unit testing, probably my most original (and distinctly Southern) perspective on quality:

Unit tests are like toilet paper; they have it everywhere I go, but the quality varies widely from place to place.

In my Debian work