APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: December 2018
Research Watch, and Java by Contract
I introduced Java by Contract, a tool for building design-by-contract style invariants, preconditions and postconditions in Java using annotations. It’s MIT licensed, contributions are welcome, and I hope this helps lots of people to introduce stronger correctness checking into your … Continue reading
Posted in academia, Java, OOP
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Teaching Quality Object-Oriented Programming
About this paper Teaching Quality OOP by Yishai A. Feldman, published March 2005 (see the link for full citation). Notes One of the points made in my book Object-Oriented Programming the Easy Way is that objects should be specified by … Continue reading
Posted in academia
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Cleaner Code
Readers of OOP the easy way will be familiar with the distinction between object-oriented programming and procedural programming. You will have read, in that book, about how what we claim is OOP in the sentence “OOP has failed” is actually … Continue reading
Product teams: our products are not our products
Woah, too many products. Let me explain. No, it will take too long, let me summarise. Sometimes, people running software organisations call their teams “product teams”, and organise them around particular “products”. I do not believe that this is a … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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Mapping software engineering tools
Despite the theory that everything can be done in software (and of course, anything that can’t be done could in principle be approximated using numerical methods, or fudged using machine learning), software engineering itself, the business of writing software, seems … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, tool-support
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More speed, lower velocity
I frequently meet software teams who describe themselves as “high velocity”, they even have graphs coming from Jira to prove it, and yet their ability to ship great software, to delight their customers, or even to attract their customers, doesn’t … Continue reading
Posted in Business, performance, process, software-engineering
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Figurative Programming and Gloom: the [G]raphical [LOOM]
Donald Knuth is pretty cool. One of the books he wrote that I own and have actually read[*] is Literate Programming, in which he describes (among other things) weaving program text and documentation together in a single narrative. Two of … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Two books
A member of a mailing list I’m on recently asked: what two books should be on every engineer’s bookshelf? Here’s my answer. Many software engineers, the ones described toward the end of Code Complete 2, would benefit most from Donald … Continue reading
