One of best ways to get the full effect of pair programming is if everyone programs with everyone else. This maximizes learning in the team. Here are three simple tricks we’ve found useful to get the pair programming to flow better. Magnets: Getting away from task ownership is essential to get pair ...

I’m getting a little fed up with descriptions of project development lifecycles starting with waterfall, and then describing iterative and agile development in waterfall terms. What happens if we start on the other side? Project development lifecycles Agile: The project creates a roadmap for a year ...

What do you do if you want to have a reliable system? You make sure you have redundancy: More than one component can do a certain job. You back up you valuable data to a separate system. You have two servers to provide your critical service, in case on fails. Yet, many projects have no plan for the ...

When I started pair programming daily, it changed my life and my projects for the better. I often point to pair programming as one of the most influential possible interventions on any projects. Very often, an audience member with a healthy degree skepticism will inquire about the research into pair...

“Refactoring” is the practice of “improving the design of existing code without changing its behavior”. It’s an essential part of software maintenance. Done well, refactoring will make sure your code base is easy to maintain. Done poorly, refactoring will lead you into a dangerous swamp where you’ll...

At the Smidig 2010 Agile User Group confererence in Oslo, I conducted an open space workshop where I tested out a few retrospective techniques on the participants. The workshop was very well attended, and so I’ve posted a Norwegian language summary on the company blog for Steria Norway. Go check it ...

I’ve published a Norwegian language article titled: “Min supre produkteier” (“My excellent product owner”) at the company blog for Steria Norway. Go check it out if you understand Norwegian!

Or: Poor man’s dependency injection: Singleton-initialized field As dependency injection frameworks like Spring have become central in software applications in the last few years, the conventional view is now that the Singleton pattern is evil and should never be used. Instead, relationships between...

The more I code, the more I’ve learned to appreciate keeping the code clean even during complex refactorings. By “clean”, I mean that the code always compiles and the test always run. I often find myself in a situation where I have a method call that’s starting to accumulate parameters. Something li...

I’ve published a Norwegian language article titled: “Slik lykkes du med smidig utvikling” (“How to succeed with agile development”) at the company blog for Steria Norway. Go check it out if you understand Norwegian!

I though I’d do something different this time. Instead of describing something technical, I have recorded a five minute video that shows a very neat trick in Java: How to create a bit of code that wraps existing method calls to an object with any behavior you may desire. This is nothing new, but I’v...

As an architect for a team with a large number of people, I have a couple of problems: I often make decisions that turns out to be quite crappy. Even when I think I’ve written or drawn something that’s smart, it often turns out that it’s incomprehensible to everyone else Luckily, I’ve noticed that m...

What if you had to report daily your progress on the tasks you’re programming in your project. Wait, you say: “I already do that in my daily standup meetings”. But if your standup meeting is anything like most standup meetings out there, you’ve got a serious blind spot. What if I said that writing c...

Ctrl-1 is the magic “do what I think” button in Eclipse. Whenever I press it, Eclipse seems to come up with something that’s helpful in the current context. In this blog post, I illustrate 10 things that Eclipse hide under the ctrl-1 keypress. This is a follow up on my post on Eclipse stenography. I...

When working on replacement projects, I often find I need to make minor changes to an existing database that is still in use by one of several other applications. Initially, it may seem like situation will force you to conform to the current database schema. But there are other options, even though ...

Sometimes I’m asked to write or speak about something with very little preparation. In these situations, I need a tool that can help me: Organize my thoughts quickly Prioritize the wheat before the chaff Maintain a coherent train of thought I find a very useful structure for archiving this to be wha...

Pair programming and test-driven development are some of the practices that are most often talked about and least often actually understood. So I’ve decided to undertake the task to teach myself to program a simple, yet realistic problem with a pair programming partner. The goal is to create an ente...

According to Wikipedia, stenography or shorthand is “is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language”. Just as a stenographer learns to take down information really fast, a good programmer can learn to write co...

Everyone has heard horror stories about pointy-haired-bosses counting lines of source code to track the progress of a project. We roll our eyes and laugh at their stupidity. But before you laugh too much, you might want to find out whether you’re really any better. Most of what software projects mea...

How many steps do you need to perform to release a new version of your software? Do you even know? Releasing frequently requires the release process to be as streamlined as possible. A good way to get started is to write a step-by-step instruction that explicitly state everything that needs be perfo...

No computer system is an island. At least not these days. This creates a challenge when you want to change APIs: Do you want to upgrade all affected systems at once, or do you want to support multiple versions? Both approaches have downsides. Coordinating several upgrades increase the risk that one ...

Smidig 2010: Norges største smidige konferanse Har du fått med deg at Smidig 2010 arrangeres 16.-17. November på Radisson BLU, Holberg plass i Oslo? Konferansen har åpnet for foredrag. Early bird prisen på billetter varer KUN TIL TORSDAG, så det gjelder å bestemme seg fort! Opplev vårt unike format,...

At JavaZone 2010 I will be giving a lightning talk on APIs that use dynamic subclasses. These APIs make it possible to do things in Java that seem like pure magic. Here are some ideas of what you can get from these APIs and a look under the hood, so you really understand what’s going on. Mockito - “...

As I release more frequently, I start to focus on automating the actual process of deploying a release. One of the most powerful steps of automating deployment is to automatically upgrade the database schema. This technique first saw mainstream use with the Ruby-on-Rails framework. Today, there are ...

A software architect who doesn’t care about what his system is supposed to do isn’t worth his salt. For the term “software architect” to hold any meaning at all, it must be to describe someone who understands what the customer needs and designs a system that is fit for this purpose. Sometimes, howev...

If you want to release your code frequently, you have to automate the release process. If your software interacts with shared components or other applications, the release script may have to update shared configuration files. In this blog post, I recall when I solved this with a crontab file. The pr...

If you want to release frequently, a problem you may encounter is that some features, even though functionally complete, don’t stand well on their own, but require other features to be valuable to the user. If you want to release the system in this state, you need a way to hide features. A Feature-o...

As a general observation, it seems that when software architects try to solve general problems, they come up with horrible designs; when they solve specific problems, they come up with good designs. Designs made without reference to a problem often become complex and not very fit for purpose when we...

When developing a system that people use in their day to day work, I often meet the following requirement: “A user should be able to see all tasks from each functional area on a single screen.” This requirement requires integration with all parts of the system, making it architecturally costly. Luck...

“Design” is a verb, not a noun. If I want to create a good program, studying the process of getting there is much more important than the resulting software. This is why I use coding katas as a form of study. I find an interesting problem problem and then solve the same problem over and over again. ...