Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
It is possible to measure certain properties of code, and on the one hand, correlate them with project factors known to have economic merit and on the other, with programmer-pleasing practices. This session surveys emerging evidence that we can measure the effect of the technical practices of Agile development, and explores what we might be able to do about it to our benefit.
Ruby on Rails has been around for about 5 years and in those years developers have created a lot of applications. Many of those applications were created while learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails and may not have used the best practices but yet made it into production web sites. These web applications can be problematical but a new book focused on the solution is available.
Jaibeer Malik has posted an introduction of how to address and introduce code quality within a team. His series of posts may suite you if you are in a situation where you have to either learn more yourself or introduce these ideas to others. The series provides a brief overview of the topic and gives pointers in different directions of where to go to study more.
'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.
Continuous Integration, a basic XP practice, has now become an accepted development best practice. InfoQ presents Chapter 6: Continuous Testing, with advice and examples for writing good tests to ensure system quality, from the book "Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk," which aims help teams make CI a transparent "non-event".
In this video recorded during QCon London 2008, Pete Goodliffe presents two Linux-based audio products with a complete different outcome, software design making the difference.
In this talk from RubyFringe, GitHub's Tom Preston-Werner talks about a methodical approach to solving problems and debugging. Also: he explains how to use the "Deathbed Filter" for choosing projects.
In this interview filmed during RubyFringe 2008, Luke Francl explains his position towards testing. While supporting unit testing, he thinks testing is not going to reveal all application defects. Development teams should also practice code reviews and usability tests which are likely to discover bugs not visible though other methods.
Debate sprang up at JAOO '07 around Bob Martin's assertion that "nowadays it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, he debated with Jim Coplien on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
