Tips for managers on the basic things to have in place if one wants to run a successful project.

When we started our current project we did not use context/specification style testing, instead we used testcase-per-class with a four-phase test model (also known as arrange-act-assert).

How to improve your classes so that they have only one major responsibility.

Java Beans have long been the standard by which all Java objects are defined. This post challenges the notion and asks the question, "Have Beans been holding us back?" and offers a very powerful concept in replacement of today's standard.

Object database experts select the best patterns

When you get a new job, you can breathe a sigh of relief, but not for long. You have an offer letter in your hand, and it is easy to miss one of the most important opportunities of your life – the starting salary. Here’s the tale of two programmers. When getting a job, Goofus didn’t negotiate. Gallant asked and got an extra $2500. They both get yearly raises of 3%

In this final article we will be looking at just one design pattern. We started with the fine details of reference counting, zoomed out to look at whole data structures, and now move to the even larger perspective of designing subsystems. Like every pattern, this pattern needs a name, and our working title is "midlayer mistake". This makes it sounds more like an anti-pattern, as it appears to describe something that should be avoided. While that is valid, it is also very strongly a pattern with firm prescriptive guides. When you start seeing a "midlayer" you know you are in the target area for this pattern and it is time to see if this pattern applies and wants to guide you in a different direction.

I just completed my first iteration on a project I was injected into at work. What makes this project interesting is the approach to software development as well as the technology makeup.

It’s been almost a year since we started implementing the Agile way of working by using SCRUM. During this time we have delivered several projects from very small to medium ones. Was it worth following this methodology? Is SCRUM really improving the way we deliver software? And what did we learn? Through this post we like to share our experiences and lessons learned with you. We are looking forward to receiving your feedback and experiences as well.

n the world of the web, lots of sites are popping up requiring users to login. When you need to do so, there's a bit more security than you might realize. What you didn't account for, is that all those username/password combinations a hacker just made off with? Yea, those are the same login's to important stuff, like e-mail, or bank accounts. Yikes!

In these challenging economic times, praising the virtues of the market economy is not exactly in fashion, and for good reason: the “efficient markets”-hypothesis has been blown out of the water spectacularly.

In one of my most recent projects, I decided to design and build the application according to the principles of Domain Driven Design. One of the guidelines promoted by Domain Driven Design is the way the interface of the Repository is designed. This changed the way I look at both the design and the location of the Repository interface. It’s all gain, no pain.

What's the most common programming language in the world? I'm not sure how you could go about measuring this, but one thing you'd need to do is consider what we mean by programming. My candidate answer considers that the most popular programming language is one used widely by people who do not consider themselves as programmers. This language is Excel, or more generally spreadsheets.

404 pages are going to happen whether you like it or not. This article will show how to create a 404 page that is useful for users.

One way we judge the effectiveness of our unit testing is by monitoring the percentage of code covered by our tests. While this is not an unusual way to measure the comprehensiveness of unit testing, the goal of unit testing should not be achieving 100% code coverage.

Kind of an old story about how many What The F... per minute during a code review is a good indication of the quality of the code.

If you haven't stressed your application in production, then you don't know if it will really perform under load.

One argument was that in a world of abundance, things that couldn’t be replicated easily, like one’s own physical presence, would increase in value. I am not finding that to be true, but I’m experimenting with selling a remote pair programming session. I’ll get back to you on how it works.

Programmers emphasize independence and entrepreneurship over business processes, development methodologies, and best practices -- to their detriment

The series is 28 videos long and each video is about 50min long. I finished watching the whole series yesterday so I figured I would write up a review.

I remember when I started working on this particular project a few months ago. When I looked over the code for the first time, I noticed something funny about the cs files. Each cs file contained multiple public types. In the extreme cases, there were dozens of public classes in one file.

A brief about Agile modeling and XP in Agile.

As I mentioned back here, my collegue, Jared MacDonald, also spoke at JavaOne 2009. Besides being an entertaining speaker, he delivered a great message about applying Test Driven Development (TDD) to user interface development. TDD is oft regarded as too difficult to apply in the UI space. Jared did a great job demonstrating why that’s simply not the case.