Saturday, September 29, 2007

Disdain Mediocrity

Ben Rady writes:

I do know some traits that good software developers all seem to share. One of them is a healthy disdain for mediocrity.

Good developers cannot stand sloppiness (in software, anyway). Apathy, haste, and carelessness send shivers down their spines. They may disagree on the best way to do things, but they all agree that things should be done the best way. And they’re constantly looking and learning to find exactly what the best way is. They realize that seeking it is an ever-changing, lifelong quest.


I couldn't agree more...

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Three Years Of Blogging

Three years of blogging, 290 postings full of insight and wisdom (yeah, right), and ranked within the top 5 on hit count is the entry about the old Arcade joystick?!? I am flabbergasted... ;-)

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Friday, September 14, 2007

Finding Unused Classes Under .NET

While integrating some .NET libraries (which by the way came from an external development partner) in our main project, we noticed several classes that never were utilized. Getting suspicious, we decided to search for all unused classes. The question was: How to do that?

The .NET compiler is no big help on this, which is understandable - it can't emit warnings on apparently unused public classes within a class library, as they are most likely part of the library's public API, but happen not to referenced inside the library itself. The same is true for IDE-integrated refactoring tools like Resharper. Resharper points out private/internal methods never called and private/internal types never referenced, but public classes are another story.

So my next bet was on static code analysis tools. They usually let you define the system boundaries, hence it should be possible to identify classes never referenced within those boundaries.

FXCop was one of the most widely used tools in the early days of .NET, but seems a little bit abandoned now, and did not have any matching analysis rule (or at least I didn't find any).

Total .NET Analyzer on the other hand looked very promising and supposedly includes this feature. In contrast to FXCop it parses the sourcecode as well, thus has the means for a more powerful breakdown. Unfortunately it ran out of memory when scanning our Visual Studio solution on my 2GB developer workstation.

Finally I ended up applying NDepend. NDepend has extensive code analysis capabilities, including the highly-anticipated search for unused classes. It also calculates all kinds of other metrics. I have only scratched the surface so far, but what I have seen is very convincing.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Leading Software Development Teams: The Human Factor

I am currently preparing a presentation on the topic "Leading Software Development Teams: The Human Factor". Once I find time I will translate it to English and post it on this blog, for the moment here is my list of sources:

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Declare War On Your Enemies

While Joel Spolsky - as recently mentioned - prefers to bury bozos under a pile of bug reports, Ted Neward goes on the offensive and declares war on such and other enemies of project success:

Software is endless battle and conflict, and you cannot develop effectively unless you can identify the enemies of your project. Obstacles are subtle and evasive, sometimes appearing to be strengths and not distractions. You need clarity. Learn to smoke out your obstacles, to spot them by the signs and patterns that reveal hostility and opposition to your success. Then, once you have them in your sights, have your team declare war. As the opposite poles of a magnet create motion, your enemies - your opposites - can fill you with purpose and direction. As people and problems that stand in your way, who represent what you loathe, oppositions to react against, they are a source of energy. Do not be naive: with some problems, there can be no compromise, no middle ground.


Highly recommended reading material!