Author: Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my site.
Understanding the Difference Between Static And Dynamic Code Analysis
I’m going to cover some relative basics today. At least, they’re basics when it comes to differentiating between static and dynamic code analysis. If you’re new to the software development...
Using NDepend To Get Going Quickly on C# Projects
Assuming you’ve had at least one job working on one or more C# projects, let me paint a familiar picture for you. I’m talking about your onboarding time with a...
What the Singleton Pattern Costs You
Do you use the singleton pattern? If not, I’m assuming that you either don’t know what it is or that you deliberately avoid it. If you do use it, you’re...
The Role of Static Analysis in Testing
“What do you do?” In the United States, people ask this almost immediately upon meeting one another for the first time. These days, I answer the question by saying that...
How Has Static Code Analysis Changed Through the Years?
Years ago, I found myself staring at about 10 lines of source code. This code had me stymied, and I could feel the onset of a headache as I read...
Code Coverage Should Not Be a Management Concern
You could easily find yourself mired in programmer debates over code coverage. Here’s one, for instance. It raged on for hundreds of votes, dozens of comments, many answers, and eight...
Is Your Team Wrong About Your Codebase? Prove It. Visually.
I don’t think I’ll shock anyone by pointing out that you can find plenty of disagreements among software developers. Are singletons evil? Is TDD a good idea (or dead)? What’s...
Code Quality Metrics: Separating the Signal from the Noise
Say you’re working in some software development shop and you find yourself concerned with code quality metrics. Reverse engineering your team’s path to this point isn’t terribly hard because, in...
C# Version History: Examining the Language Past and Present
I still remember my first look at C# in the early 2000s. Microsoft had released the first major version of the language. I recall thinking that it was Java, except...
What is Static Analysis? An Explanation for Everyone
Static analysis, as a concept, seems to earn itself a certain reputation. The general population may regard programming as a technocratic, geeky pursuit. But inside the world of programmers, static...
Should You Aim for 100 Percent Test Coverage?
Test coverage serves as one of the great lightning rods in the world of software development. First, people ask whether it makes for a good metric at all. Then they...
In Defense of Using Your Users as Software Testers
In most shops of any size, you’ll find a person that’s just a little too cynical. I’m a little cynical myself, and we programmers tend to skew that way. But this...
How to Use NDepend’s Trend Charts
Imagine a scene for a moment. A year earlier, a corporate VP spun up a major software project for his organization. He brought a slew of his organization’s software developers into...
Fixing Your Tangled Dependency Graph
I’ve written before about making use of NDepend’s dependency graph. Well, indirectly, anyway. In that post, I talked about the phenomenon of actual software architecture not matching the pretty diagrams people...
Why NDepend Uses Google’s Page Rank
I remember my early days of blogging as sort of a comedy of errors. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think those early posts were terrible, since I’d always...
Is There a Correct Way to Comment Your Code?
Given that I both consult and do a number of public things (like blogging), I field a lot of questions. As a result, the subject of code comments comes up...
Are Code Rules Meant to Be Broken?
If you’ve never seen the movie Footloose, I can’t honestly say I recommend it. If your tastes run similarly to mine, you’ll find it somewhat over the top. A boy...
Things Everyone Forgets Before Committing Code
Committing code involves, in a dramatic sense, two universes colliding. Firstly, you have the universe of your own work and metaphorical workbench. You’ve worked for some amount of time on...
How to Evaluate Your Static Analysis Process
I often get inquiries from clients and prospects about setting up and operationalizing static analysis. This makes sense. After all, we live in a world short on time and with...
Pulling Your Team Through a Project Crunch
Society dictates, for the most part, that childhood serves as a dress rehearsal for adulthood. Sure, we go to school and learn to read, write, and ‘rithmetic, but we also...
What DevOps Means for Static Analysis
For most of my career, software development has, in a very specific way, resembled mailing a letter. You write the thing, and then you go through the standard mail piece...
Why Expert Developers Still Make Mistakes
When pressed, I bet you can think of an interesting dichotomy in the software world. On the one hand, we programmers seem an extraordinarily helpful bunch. You can generally picture...
How to Analyze a Static Analyzer
First things first. I really wanted to call this post, “who will analyze the analyzer,” because I fancy myself clever. This title would have mirrored the relatively famous Latin question...
Static Analysis Issue Management Gets a Boost
Years ago, I led a team of software developers. We owned an eclectic portfolio of software real estate. It included some Winforms, Webforms, MVC, and even a bit of WPF sprinkled...
Quality Gates with NDepend to Help You Fail Fast
I had this car once. I loved the thing, but, before the end of its life, my wife and I had developed sort of a running joke about it. Specifically,...
Exploring the Technical Debt In Your Codebase
Recently, I posted about how the new version of NDepend lets you compute tech debt. In that post, I learned that I had earned a “B” out of the box....
The One Thing Every Company Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt
The idea of technical debt has become ubiquitous in our industry. It started as a metaphor to help business stakeholders understand the compounding cost of shortcuts in the code. Then,...
Computing Technical Debt with NDepend
For years, I have struggled to articulate technical debt to non-technical stakeholders. This struggle says something, given that technical debt makes an excellent metaphor in and of itself. The concept...
Learning Programming with Hands on Projects
If you want a surefire way to make money, look for enormous disparity between demand and supply. As software developers, we understand this implicitly. When we open our inboxes in...
What Metrics Should the CIO See?
I’ve worked in the programming industry long enough to remember a less refined time. During this time, the CIO (or CFO, since IT used to report to the CFO in...