Category: Project Management
Articles on project management in development teams, and how project managers can get the most out of their engineers’ work with NDepend.
Avoid Technical Debt with NDepend
July 14, 2024 2 minutes read The term “technical debt” has become ubiquitous in the programming world. In the most general sense, it reflects the idea that you’re doing something...
A Test Coverage Primer for Managers
May 27, 2024 5 minutes read Managing Blind Let me see if I can get in your head a little bit. You manage a team of developers and it goes...
Improve Your Code Review Game with NDepend
April 21, 2024 3 minutes read Code review is a subject with which I’m quite familiar. I’m familiar first as a participant, both reviewing and being reviewed, but it goes...
Why Should Managers Care About Static Analysis?
March 22, 2024 5 minutes read I’d like to talk a bit today about how, if you’re a dev manager for a team or teams that are responsible for .NET...
Managing to Avoid Cobras
March 3, 2024 2 minutes read Incentives are a funny thing. Done well, they can spur your team to productivity and career-advancing, win-win situations. Done not so well, they can...
What Makes a Codebase Acquirable?
May 15, 2018 1 minutes read What makes a codebase acquirable? This is the rare question that affects software developers, managers, and executives in a surprisingly similar way. And that’s...
Code Coverage Should Not Be a Management Concern
July 27, 2017 2 minutes read 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...
In Defense of Using Your Users as Software Testers
June 15, 2017 3 minutes read 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...
How to Use NDepend’s Trend Charts
June 8, 2017 1 minutes read 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...
How to Evaluate Your Static Analysis Process
April 27, 2017 1 minutes read I often get inquiries from clients and prospects about setting up and operationalizing static analysis. This makes sense. After all, we live in a...
Pulling Your Team Through a Project Crunch
April 20, 2017 1 minutes read Society dictates, for the most part, that childhood serves as a dress rehearsal for adulthood. Sure, we go to school and learn to read,...
What DevOps Means for Static Analysis
April 13, 2017 1 minutes read For most of my career, software development has, in a very specific way, resembled mailing a letter. You write the thing, and then you...
Computing Technical Debt with NDepend
February 16, 2017 2 minutes read 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...
What Metrics Should the CIO See?
February 2, 2017 1 minutes read 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...
Recovering from a Mission Critical Whiff
January 26, 2017 2 minutes read A career in software produces a handful of truly iconic moments. First, you beam with pride the first time something you wrote works in...
The Relationship Between Team Size and Code Quality
January 19, 2017 1 minutes read Over the last few years, I’ve had the occasion to observe lots of software teams. These teams come in all shapes and sizes, as...
The Best Christmas Present to Give Your Developers
January 5, 2017 2 minutes read When Christmas time arrives, it comes with the need to buy gifts, eat too much food, and attend various gatherings. All of that comes...
New Year’s Resolutions for Code Quality
December 29, 2016 2 minutes read Perhaps more than any other holiday I can think of, New Year’s Day has specific traditions. With other holidays, they range all over the map....
How Much Code Should My Developers Be Responsible For?
December 8, 2016 1 minutes read As I work with more and more organizations, my compiled list of interesting questions grows. Seriously – I have quite the backlog. And I...
How to Scale Your Static Analysis Tooling
December 1, 2016 2 minutes read If you wander the halls of a large company with a large software development organization, you will find plenty of examples of practice and process...
Alternatives to Lines of Code (LOC)
November 23, 2016 3 minutes read It amazes me that in 2016, I still hear the occasional story of some software team manager measuring developer productivity by committed lines of...
Making Devs, Architects, and Managers Happy with the Static Analysis Tool
October 27, 2016 2 minutes read Organizations come to possess a static analysis tool in a variety of ways. In some cases, management decides on some kind of quality initiative...
Static Analysis for the Build Machine?
October 20, 2016 2 minutes read I remember my earliest experiences with static analysis. Probably a decade ago, I started to read about it during grad school and poke around...
The Relationship between Static Analysis and Continuous Testing
October 13, 2016 1 minutes read As an adult, I have learned that I have an introvert type personality. I do alright socially, don’t mind public speaking, and do not...
How to Perform Effective Team Code Reviews
October 6, 2016 1 minutes read I’ve heard people say (paraphrased) that teams succeed uniformly, but fail each in its own unique way. While I might argue the veracity of...
Rewrite or Refactor?
September 29, 2016 1 minutes read I’ve trod this path before in various incarnations and I’ll do it again today. After all, I can think of few topics in software...
Secrets of Maintainable Codebases
September 28, 2016 2 minutes read You should write maintainable code. I assume people have told you this at some point. The admonishment is as obligatory as it is vague....
How to Get Company Coding Standards Right (and Wrong)
September 8, 2016 2 minutes read Nothing compares with the first week on a new job or team. You experience an interesting swirl of anticipation, excitement, novelty, nervousness, and probably...
Keep Your Codebase Fit with Trend Metrics
September 1, 2016 2 minutes read A while back, I wrote a post about the importance of trends when discussing code metrics. Metrics have an impact when teams are first...
Considering a Port to .NET Core? Use NDepend
August 25, 2016 2 minutes read An American colloquialism holds, “only two things are certain: death and taxes.” If I had to appropriate that for the software industry, I might say that...