How to Prioritize Bugs on Your To-Do List
November 3, 2016 1 minutes read People frequently ask me questions about code quality. People also frequently ask me questions about efficiency and productivity. But it seems we rarely wind up...
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....
What to do when Your Colleague Creates Spaghetti Code
September 15, 2016 2 minutes read I write for a number of different outfits and earn my living consulting around software and IT. Because of the intersection of these three...
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...
Plugging Leaky Abstractions
August 18, 2016 2 minutes read In 2002, Joel Spolsky coined something he called “The Law of Leaky Abstractions.” In software, an “abstraction” hides complexity of an underlying system from those...
Measure Your Code to Get Back on Track
August 11, 2016 1 minutes read When I’m called in for strategy advice on a codebase, I never arrive to find a situation where all parties want to tell me...
Managing Code Analysis Statistics with the NDepend API
August 4, 2016 3 minutes read If you’re familiar with NDepend, you’re probably familiar with the Visual Studio plugin, the out of the box metrics, the excellent visualization tools, and...
How to Deliver Software Projects on Time
July 28, 2016 3 minutes read Someone asked me recently, almost in passing, about the keys to delivering software projects on time. In this particular instance, it was actually a...
Static Analysis Isn’t Just for Techies
July 21, 2016 2 minutes read I do a lot of work with and around static analysis tools. Obviously, I write for this blog. I also have a consulting practice...
Easy to Miss Code Smells
July 7, 2016 2 minutes read The concept of a code smell is, perhaps, one of the most evocative in our profession. The name itself has a levity factor to...
How to Get an Edge as an IT Management Consultant
June 30, 2016 2 minutes read I’ve made no secret of, and even frequently referred to my consulting practice including aspects of IT management consulting. In short, one of my...
How to Analyze a Complex Solution
June 23, 2016 2 minutes read I’ve made no secret that I spend a lot of time these days analyzing code bases as a consultant, and I’ve also made no...
Enforcing Immutability in Multi-Threaded Projects with NDepend
June 16, 2016 2 minutes read Early in the days of object oriented programming, we really got a lot of mileage out of the language and paradigm features. For instance,...
5 Habits that Help Code Quality
June 9, 2016 2 minutes read When I’m called in to do a strategic assessment of a codebase, it’s never the result of everything being awesome. That is, no one...
How to Get Developers to Adopt Coding Standards
June 2, 2016 2 minutes read If you’re a manager, there’s a decent chance that the subject of coding standards makes you want to bang your head against a wall...
Managing Risk in your Project with Static Analysis
May 26, 2016 2 minutes read When software developer talk about static analysis, it’s often in the context of craft improvement. Ask most developers in a group about static analysis...
Static Analysis and The Other Kind of False Positives
May 19, 2016 2 minutes read A common complaint and source of resistance to the adoption of static analysis is the idea of false positives. And I can understand this....
4 Ways Custom Code Metrics Improve A Development Team
May 12, 2016 2 minutes read One of the things that has surprised me over the years is how infrequently people take advantage of custom code metrics. I say this...
The Biggest Mistake Static Analysis Could Have Prevented
May 5, 2016 2 minutes read As I’ve probably mentioned before, many of my clients pay me to come do assessments of their codebases, application portfolios and software practice. And,...
5 Reasons Architects and Developers Don’t Get Along
April 28, 2016 1 minutes read There’s a cute term for a blog post or article that advertises, in its title, a number of points of interest. For example, “9...
Code Metric Visualization: Lines of Code and Code Coverage
April 19, 2016 1 minutes read One of the features of NDepend that we get a lot of positive feedback about is its data visualization, and it’s really no surprise....
The Power of CQLinq for Developers
April 14, 2016 2 minutes read I can still remember my reaction to Linq when I was first exposed to it. And I mean my very first reaction. You’d think, as...
Let’s Build a Metric: Wrapping Up
April 7, 2016 1 minutes read In the penultimate post in the metrics series, I explained the reasoning for winding down this series. I also talked about performing one last...