Should You Aim for 100 Percent Test Coverage?
June 22, 2017 2 minutes read Test coverage serves as one of the great lightning rods in the world of software development. First, people ask whether it makes for a...
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...
Fixing Your Tangled Dependency Graph
June 1, 2017 1 minutes read 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...
Why NDepend Uses Google’s Page Rank
May 25, 2017 4 minutes read 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...
Is There a Correct Way to Comment Your Code?
May 18, 2017 2 minutes read Given that I both consult and do a number of public things (like blogging), I field a lot of questions. As a result, the...
Are Code Rules Meant to Be Broken?
May 11, 2017 2 minutes read 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...
Things Everyone Forgets Before Committing Code
May 4, 2017 2 minutes read 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...
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...
Why Expert Developers Still Make Mistakes
April 6, 2017 7 minutes read When pressed, I bet you can think of an interesting dichotomy in the software world. On the one hand, we programmers seem an extraordinarily...
How to Analyze a Static Analyzer
March 30, 2017 1 minutes read First things first. I really wanted to call this post, “who will analyze the analyzer,” because I fancy myself clever. This title would have...
Static Analysis Issue Management Gets a Boost
March 23, 2017 2 minutes read 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...
Quality Gates with NDepend to Help You Fail Fast
March 9, 2017 1 minutes read I had this car once. I loved the thing, but, before the end of its life, my wife and I had developed sort of...
Exploring the Technical Debt In Your Codebase
March 3, 2017 1 minutes read Recently, I posted about how the new version of NDepend lets you compute tech debt. In that post, I learned that I had earned...
The One Thing Every Company Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt
February 23, 2017 2 minutes read The idea of technical debt has become ubiquitous in our industry. It started as a metaphor to help business stakeholders understand the compounding cost...
Learning Programming with Hands on Projects
February 9, 2017 1 minutes read If you want a surefire way to make money, look for enormous disparity between demand and supply. As software developers, we understand this implicitly....
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...
Adding Static Analysis to Your Team’s DNA
January 12, 2017 1 minutes read Stop me if this sounds familiar. (Well, not literally. I realize that asynchronous publication makes it hard for you to actually stop me 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....
Detecting Performance Bottlenecks with NDepend
December 15, 2016 2 minutes read In the past, I’ve talked about the nature of static code analysis. Specifically, static analysis involves analyzing programs’ source code without actually executing them....
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...
The Fastest Way to Get to Know NDepend
November 17, 2016 2 minutes read I confess to a certain level of avoidance when it comes to tackling something new. If pressed for introspection, I think I do this...
Concreteness: Entering the Zone of Pain
November 10, 2016 1 minutes read Years ago, when I first downloaded a trial of NDepend, I chuckled when I saw the “Abstractness vs. Instability” graph. The concept itself does...