Monthly Archives: March 2011

Reframing the bug backlog


A lot of places where I end up have a bug backlog; usually around 200-800 defects features and other assorted stuff in there. But mostly bugs. This creates an interesting dynamic, first of all trying to attack the backlog leads … Continue reading

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Adam Smith on software


Adam Smith famously wrote of ‘a man of humanity in Europe’ who would not ‘sleep tonight’ if ‘he was to lose his little finger tomorrow’ but would ‘snore with the most profound security’ if a hundred million of his Chinese … Continue reading

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Some syntactic sugar around locking & threading


One of the things that make debugging threading easier is to reduce the amount of code that you are debugging. This makes syntactic sugar actually quite important when it comes to this problem space. The lock keyword and sections are … Continue reading

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Gaming the IDE


So people have a lot of ideas about how software should be written; how code should look; what should be tested; and just about everything else. We also know we can measure most of these things, cyclomatic complexity, code coverage, … Continue reading

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The Builder analogy is right


So there has been some critique on the builder analogy. And a lot of it is deserved. But one place where it is right; and not often referenced is how the builder comparison applies to current builders. Current builders are … Continue reading

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