Author: Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my site.
That Code’s Not Dead – It Went To a Farm Upstate… And You’re Paying For It
January 21, 2016 2 minutes read When it comes to pets, there’s a heartbreaking lie that parents often tell little children when they believe that those children are not yet...
The Case for the NDepend Dashboard Feature
January 14, 2016 2 minutes read If you hang around agile circles long enough, you’re quite likely to hear the terms “big, visible chart” and “information radiator.” I think both...
Visualizing Your (Real) Software Architecture
January 11, 2016 1 minutes read Diagrams of software architecture have a certain aesthetic appeal to them. They usually consist of grayscale or muted pastel colors and nice, soft shapes with...
With Code Metrics, Trends are King
December 31, 2015 2 minutes read Here’s a scene that’s familiar to any software developer. You sit down to work with the source code of a new team or project...
Let’s Build a Metric: Global and Local Scope
December 24, 2015 4 minutes read Last time in this series, I began an exploration of how a method might be impacted by the scope of the variables that it...
Be Careful with Software Metaphors
December 17, 2015 6 minutes read Over the years, there have been any number of popular software metaphors that help people radically misunderstand the realities of software development. Probably the...
The Most Important Code Metrics You’ve Never Heard Of
December 10, 2015 6 minutes read Oh, how I hope you don’t measure developer productivity by lines of code. As Bill Gates once ably put it, “measuring software productivity by lines...
Let’s Build a Metric: Using CQLinq to Reason about Application State
December 3, 2015 4 minutes read I’ve been letting the experiments run for a bit before posting results so as to give all participants enough time to submit, if they...
Mistakes Dev Managers Make
November 26, 2015 2 minutes read Managing a team of software developers is a tall order. This is doubly true when the line management includes both org chart duties (career...
Let’s Build a Metric: Incorporating Results and Exploring CQLinq
November 19, 2015 4 minutes read It turns out I was wrong in the last post, at least if the early returns from the second experiment are to be believed....
Refactoring is a Development Technique, Not a Project
November 12, 2015 2 minutes read One of the more puzzling misconceptions that I hear pertains to the topic of refactoring. I consult on a lot of legacy rescue efforts,...
Let’s Build a Metric 7: Counting the Inputs
November 5, 2015 2 minutes read Over the last two Let’s Build a Metric installments of this series, I’ve talked about different ways to count lines of code and about...
Software Rewrite: The Chase
October 29, 2015 3 minutes read Last week, a post I wrote, “The Myth of the Software Rewrite“, became pretty popular. This generated a lot of comments and discussion, so...
Relax. Everyone’s Code Rots
October 22, 2015 2 minutes read I earn my living, or part of it, anyway, doing something very awkward. I get called in to assess and analyze codebases for health...
Let’s Build a Metric 6: Cyclomatic Complexity Explained
October 15, 2015 3 minutes read In the last installment of this series, I talked a good bit about lines of code. As it turns out, the question, “what is a...
Hidden Costs in Your Software
October 8, 2015 2 minutes read One of the things I remember most vividly from my CIO days was the RFP process for handling spikes in demands on my group’s time....
Let’s Build a Metric 5: Flavors of Lines of Code
October 1, 2015 1 minutes read The last episode of this series was heavy on theory, so let’s balance it out a bit with some applied science. The lofty goal...
Bringing Objectivity to Clean Code
September 24, 2015 2 minutes read If you want to stir up a pretty serious amount of discussion-churn, wander over to where the software developers sit and ask for a...
The Myth of the Software Rewrite
September 17, 2015 2 minutes read “We can’t go on like this. We need to rewrite this thing from scratch.” The Writing is on the Wall These words infuriate CIOs...
Let’s Build a Metric 4: Science and Experiments
September 10, 2015 5 minutes read Last time around, I promised a foray into Newtonian mechanics, so I might as well start with that. This is the equation for gravitational...
Let’s Build a Metric 3: Compositeness
August 20, 2015 5 minutes read Last time, I talked through a little bit of housekeeping on the way to creating a metric that would be, uniquely, ours. Nevermind the...
Let’s Build a Metric 2: Getting the Units Right
August 13, 2015 5 minutes read Last time in this series, there was definitely some housekeeping to accomplish. I laid the groundwork for the series by talking a bit of...
Let’s Build a Metric 1: What’s in a Metric?
August 6, 2015 5 minutes read A while back, I made a post on my blog announcing the commencement of a series on building a better, composite code metric. Well, it’s...
A Software Architect’s Best Friend
July 29, 2015 5 minutes read To this day, I have a persistent nightmare about my time in college. It’s always pretty similar. I wake up and I have a...
Using NDepend to Make You a Better Programmer
July 15, 2015 4 minutes read If you’re a software developer, particularly of the newly minted variety, the concept of static analysis might not seem approachable. It sounds academic. It...
Static Analysis : Code as Data
July 8, 2015 4 minutes read A lot of programmers have some idea of what static analysis is, as least superficially. If I mention the term, what pops into your...