Does anyone have a reasonable definition of Code Quality? I don't think there is a good definition, and I see plenty of bad definitions. There are many definitions for Correctness, but I would expect correctness to be a given, and quality is meaningless if the code is broken. I suspect quality is something like: correctness ...
I wonder if it is a good practice to use JUnit's @Ignore. And how people are using it? I came up with the following use case: Let's say I am developing a class and writing a JUnit test for it, which doesn't pass, because I'm not quite done with the class. Is it a good practice to mark it with @Ignore? I'm a little concerned that we m...
Do you use source code analyzers? If so, which ones and for which language development? Do you find them helpful in solving potential bugs in your code? Or are most of their warnings trivial? After prolonged use, do you find your code quality to be higher than before? ...
This article got me thinking. Languages are split in to about 6 groups in the article: The Cs Virtual Machine Languages Languages Formerly Known as “Scripting” Functional Straight Jackets Lisps JavaScript I would like to know if it is better for a programmer to be very proficient in one of this groups or be semi-proficient in all o...
Given a team of developers collaborating on the production of a piece of sofware. How would you go about assessing individual developer performance and quality? I'm mostly looking for non subjective and (as far as this is possible) rational criteria by which the quality of the work of a developer can be judged (if not measured). I kno...
A lot of the talk around quality code and quality software seems to revolve around the needs of "The Market" Can the quality of code and the quality of the resulting software be judged outside of this business context? If so, should it? If not, why not? ...
Writing less code will give best productive/quality/performance! Is it true? ...
The Quality Assurance (QA) department is roughly a bunch of testers debunking your app(s) all day, giving the green light for releases, handling Alpha / Beta programs. And much more. But without a QA department in a software company, issues arises too often in the field, and problems costs more to fix. However, most companies starts in ...
This is based on this question. A number of answers were proposed that generate non-uniform distributions and I started wondering how to quantify the non uniformity of the output. I'm not looking for patterning issues, just single value aspects. What are the accepted procedures? My current thinking is to computer the average Shannon ...
Is it possible to use Six Sigma Quality Management with Software Development Processes? What's your experience on that? If you're using an Agile method like Scrum or XP, isn't Six Sigma too bureaucratic? I'm talking about quality management on software development as a whole, since requirements gathering until deployoment and operatio...
What techniques you use to ensure code quality? Pairing? Code reviews? Design? Documentation? What helps you creating extensible quality software? ...
We all walked out of school with the stars in our eyes and little experience in "real-world" programming. How have your opinions on programming as a craft changed since you've gained more experience away from academia? I've become more and more about design a la McConnell : wide use of encapsulation, quality code that gives you warm fuz...
Do you think it's worth trading off some performance for code-quality and maintainability? I remember a post by Jeff Atwood that stated that hardware is cheap, developers are not. I think I'd like to change that to "Hardware is cheap, time is not." I've noticed with an MVC project I've been working on lately that sometimes I lose DAYS...
For a image-upload tool I want to detect the (subjective) quality of an image automatically, resulting in a rating of the quality. I have the following idea to realize this heuristically: Obviously incorporate the resolution into the rating. Compress it to JPG (75%), decompress it and compare jpg-size vs. decompressed size to gain a r...
Jeff Atwood's recent blog about bad apples reminded me about something I've given a lot of though about over my career. What is more important, the quality of the members of the team or the quality of the process they follow. I've come to the conclusion that the quality of the members of the team is far more important than the process ...
Do you think having a great memory is REQUIRED to be a great programmer? I don't consider myself a great programmer but I do think I am decent. But my memory is REALLY bad so I find myself always having to remind myself how to do things. I mean I "know where to look" but sometimes it makes me feel like I am just a crappy programmer. Wh...
I've been browsing revision 1.38.0 of the Boost libraries, in an attempt to decide if there are enough jewels there to justify negotiating my company's external software approval process. In the course of writing test programs and reading the documents, I've reached a couple conclusions of course, not everything in Boost will ever be o...
Do you have a process within your company for the approval and copy-editing of text on your software products? If so, do you employ a professional copy-editor, or does a nominated person within the organisation take responsibility for this? Edit I know that this is not exactly programming-related, but it does have a strong bearing on ...
A Unit-Test should produce deterministic result be independent be valid ... What other characteristics should a test also have? ...
Edit: Since this question was asked a lot of improvement has happened in the standard Python scientific libraries (which was the targeted area). For example the numpy project has made a big effort to improve the docstrings. One can still argue if it would have been possible to address these issues continuously right from the start. I ...