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Category: Good practices

Kaizen and Software Engineering

Kaizen and Software Engineering

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Kaizen is a very interesting approach, also in the software industry. On Wikipedia you’ll find the following description of Kaizen: Kaizen is a Japanese word adopted into English referring to a philosophy or practices focusing on continuous improvement in manufacturing activities, business activities in general, and even life in general, depending on interpretation and usage. Kaizen aims to eliminate waste, to improve the process or activities (techniques). I heard about Kaizen the first time at an economic course, and I…

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Fail Fast principle

Fail Fast principle

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Recently I received a NullReference-Exception when I called another method from a foreign component. Fortunately I had the source code of this component and I found the following code: [code language=”csharp”] public class AgeValidator { public Dictionary Config { get; set; } public bool Validate(int nAge) { int nMinAge = FindValue(“MinAge”); return nAge > nMinAge; } private int FindValue(string strParameter) { int nValue = -1; if(this.Config.ContainsKey(strParameter)) nValue = this.Config[strParameter]; return nValue; } } [/code] There are several problems with this…

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How to structure code in an unit test

How to structure code in an unit test

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When you create your unit tests for a method in the SUT (software under test) you will ask yourself how to structure the code in the test method.I saw two kind of syntaxes which help to structure the code in a unit test method (well, actually there are at least three, but the third syntax is just chaos, so this is definitely not the way how to do it). SEVT-Syntax [code language=”csharp”] [TestFixture] public class ThingTest { [Test] public void…

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When to use stored procedures

When to use stored procedures

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Recently I discussed with a colleague when to use stored procedures. As exptected it was quite a religious conversation. A few days later I found the following screencast: The Pros and Cons of Stored Procedures Based on the discussion and the screencast I tried to summarize my Pros and Cons: Pros Layering Low-level-Security Protect queries from changing data-access technologies (jdbc, hibernate, toplink, dbcommands, linq to sql, entity framework, nhibernate, etc…) Ivory-Tower-Feature: changing database during project does nearly never happen Coarse-grained…

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Eat your own dog food

Eat your own dog food

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Recently I heard the expression “eat your own dog food” again. For a company which produce software for a customer it is very usefull to use the same technology or product in house. But this expression is also usefull in the daily business of a modern software developer. One big advantage of test driven development (TDD) is, that you change the perspective before you code a class or a method. In the test first approach you create the test before…

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