Quality isn’t a tool–You can’t install it!

Quality isn’t a tool–You can’t install it!

Did you ask yourself why a team in an organization produces very good software quality and another team in the same organization just struggles to get things done and those things are in really bad quality? Interesting is also that for both teams exists the same rules (methologies, procedures, tools, frameworks, etc.). But why could and does this happen? Some people – mostly managers or vendors – try to distill quality to a recipe. Vendors could sell it expensively (with…

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Are stale data evil?

Are stale data evil?

When you’re a software engineer who produces software for enterprises like banks or assurances, then it is normal you have huge databases (several gigabytes). Such systems have an operative application where users do the daily business of the company and there are more informative parts (or strategic parts) of the systems which the management uses. At a first glance, there isn’t a problem with those two views, but as you probably know, those companies have for the second part for…

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Anti-Pattern ‘Validation by Execute ‘n’ Rollback’

Anti-Pattern ‘Validation by Execute ‘n’ Rollback’

Recently in some reviews I saw an anti-pattern. First you have to know, in the code, there was a validation of the data before it was stored in the database. So far so good. But when I looked at the validation code, I saw the following: public void Validate() { DoProcess(true); } And the persist logic (with some business logic) looked like this: public void Process() { DoProcess(false); } So, I asked myself, what the Boolean means. Well, here is…

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Who should make decisions about technologies?

Who should make decisions about technologies?

One of the biggest problems of software engineering companies in Switzerland is currently to get new software developers. To get new employees there are several points as for example salary, environment, career possibilities and technologies. The last point looks easy but in reality it isn’t that easy. Why are essential technology decisions (like languages, frameworks, application servers or big libraries) not only made by developers? Why does the management mostly make those decisions? In this blog post I try to…

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TF.exe or maybe the most useful tool for TFS

TF.exe or maybe the most useful tool for TFS

When you’ve to use TFS, then there are moments when you’re missing some features in the UI tools in Visual Studio. In those situations the console tool tf.exe is very useful. In this short blog post I summarized the commands I used the most. Update an old version of a branch It could happen, that the production branch or an older feature branch isn’t up-to-date, because somebody forgot one or several merges from the main branch. To fix that, there…

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