Software development

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is good reading for all developers and good addition to Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. The Pragmatic Programmer is about developers everyday work and provides solutions and ideas about how to solve problems we may face more than once.

Loggers are one of most popular examples about interfaces for sure. And there are a lot of implementations of loggers. Some implementations are simple and yet powerful, some implementations may be more complex. All we have to is to select implementation we need and integrate it to our application. It seems like good idea at first place but as soon as we need to switch from one implementation to another we discover nasty dependencies we have to change in all places where we are logging. Let’s see how to avoid these dependencies.

I’m sure you have seen classes that initialize a lot of objects in their constructor. These classes may be hard to test because of those object creations I mentioned. To get around this problem we use Extract and override factory method refactoring so we can extend these classes and override some factory methods.

Sometimes you are not able to use Extract Interface refactoring because interface of parameter may be too large or there may be no interface at all. You just have class to pass in and you are not able to fake it or extend it to get class testable. In this case you have to use Adapt Parameter refactoring to create adapter that is seen through common some common class of interface.

Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, the book I introduced couple of days ago, introduces something called The List. The List is your task list that tells you what tasks you have, how long they would take to get done and when one or another task should be done.

This winter I read book Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March is about death march projects and how to survive them. There are also chapters describing decisions that you should never make when managing death march project. And there are great tips that help you avoid bad mistakes in death march projects. The book describes also developers life in such projects and gives them some good advises how to stay alive.

In legacy code you may find classes with constructor where some objects are created and initialized. These classes are not easily testable because they depend on other classes and therefore when you unit test these classes they may also throw exceptions of classes they depend on. In these cases we can use parameterize constructor refactoring.

I finished yesterday another great book: Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projectsfrom pragmatic series. This book is not theory book that leaves you with many questions and no idea how to move along. Instead, you get an good idea about how to develop software and manage software projects successfully.

Extreme Programming Explained is overview and guide to extreme programming (XP). The author of this book – Kent Beck – is well known XP evangelist with great experiences on the field. XP is not very simple thing to start with when one has worked some years on “classic” way. Kent shows us the way to XP and gives great explanations and suggestion about how to get started with XP.

Getting Results From Software Development Teams is book about software projects management. Author of this book, Lawrence J. Peters, is one of the veterans in field who has worked on software projects management over 40 years. I think it is solid experience to share with others.