8 January 2013
Technology decisions should not be made in isolation, particularly when you are trying to weigh up building a solution or buying a third party platform.
17 December 2012
REST is more of an architectural style than a set of standards. That said, a service should follow certain conventions if it is to be predictable and simple to work with.
6 November 2012
CRUD-based repositories may appear convenient but they can make for poor service interfaces as well as giving rise to a lot of unnecessary boiler-plate code.
3 September 2012
Technical debt may be a great metaphor to describe the corrosive effect of quick and dirty design decisions, but it can be difficult to identify, measure and manage.
2 July 2012
Development teams can struggle with dependency injection, often because they don’t have a clear understanding of how best to use it.
30 April 2012
Developers and architects like to build things, so their initial impulse is often to flatten the place, lay some stronger foundations and build something impressive. It can be difficult to get them excited about incremental innovation, even when this is generally the most sensible approach from both a technical and commercial perspective.
11 April 2012
Despite all the best intentions, software reuse tends to be confined to third party frameworks and tools rather than being an integral part of the development process. Are we expecting too much from software reuse and should we learn to set our sights a little lower?
29 December 2011
Everybody would agree that quality is an important part of the software development process. However, the complexity involved in delivering quality is often poorly understood and the amount of effort it requires tends to be underestimated.
3 February 2011
Estimates are, in essence, a kind of crystal ball gazing. You are making a series of educated guesses about how long something will take whilst often being hampered by imperfect understanding and squeezed by commercial pressures.
15 October 2010
Coding standards are one of those documents that managers often feel obliged to produce, so they are frequently written without any clear sense of purpose. A number of different motives can inspire coding standards - not all of them very positive.