Category Archives: Software Engg
Deliverables On-Time vis-a-vis Technical Debt Risk
When we are working under tough deadlines and there is mounted lot of pressure on software engineers to crank out features by features in a short time to meet business needs, there are high possibilities that software system end up getting high technical debt. Is it that delivery managers are not aware of above fact? Most of the times they are. However, they compromise on software quality against the need to take the product to the market. So far so good. However, they should make it a point to clear out some of those debt with a release just meant for that. These kind of releases are sometimes also called …
How to Create Software Quality Metrics For Your Project
Well, if you are a software development partner for one or more of your customers, and you are looking forward for some of the following, you may want to adopt software quality metrics: Provide customers with software quality trending on various different software quality characteristic Monitor one or more projects for software quality What are various different things that you could measure for quantifying software quality? Defects Density (Functional Suitability): There are different data points you can use to measure defects density. Defects density can be defined to be one of the following: Number of defects divided by total lines of code written per sprint/release Number of defects divided by …
How to Write Good Doc Comments for a Class/Method?
Well, software engineers love to jump to the code (minus document) once design is completed. Majority of them do not write the help text around the class or methods. Some of them do write but they do not provide enough information. There are various reasons for the lack of enough comments within a class. Some of them are lack of time, lack of writing/articulation skills etc. Following are some of the questions which would you like to answer as part of comments for method or a class: Functionality: What does the class or the method do? You may want to provide information regarding the business requirement that the component fulfills. …
How to Write a Winner Design Document for Agile User Stories
When the development is based on agile methodology such as SCRUM and especially, distributed SCRUM, at some point, the need for design document becomes key to success of sprint delivery with as lesser technical debt as possible. In that regard, there has been questions around whether to have something such as design document at all. Many of those practicing agile as a developer just hate the idea of writing design documents and relate it with waterfall development model. They give the argument that a) in agile development, design have to change as we develop and b) thus, the design document may go obsolete in no time. To a great extent, I …
A Quick Way to Identify Code with Low Testability
Following is a quick way to identify code with low testability and hence low maintainability: Take any specific public method of the class Count for number of decision points such as following: – If – For – While – Switch – Inline ifs If the number of decision points in a method is more than 15 or so, it could be taken as indication that it may get difficult to write unit tests covering all possible flows. Thus, the code will have lower testability. The number of decision points in a method is also used to define/measure cyclomatic complexity of the method, or more specifically, McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity. Thus, mathematically …
5 Things to Consider while Gathering Requirements from your Customers
Most of the time, software engineers are primarily interested in understanding requirements only from functionality perspective or, more simply speaking, understanding the stated needs. However, many a times, the delighting experience is missed due to absence of one or more of following 5 software quality characteristics in software coding stage: Efficiency: This is also termed as “performance requirements” at the time of requirement analysis stage. This goes unspecified as customers are also not very much knowledgeable about how to specify efficiency requirements. Efficiency requirements include consideration of time and memory usage associated with the requirement. Security: Most of the times, software engineers are not very aware of various different security …
How to Write Re-usable Code
In my software quality sessions, one of my favorite questions had been “how to write re-usable code”. The most common answer has been following: Once one identified the re-usable components based on the functionality, once can write the components accordingly such that it can be reused. However, this argument required one to identify the reusable components at the design time. The question still remained. How would one write a code that can be termed as re-usable even if the component is not required to be reused at the moment? Another question that I ask is if it is possible to look at the code and say if this is a …
Top 5 Software Code Quality Concerns Your Customers May Have
If you want to delight your customer with great software code quality or avoid software code quality concerns of your customer, following are top 5 areas you may want to take care of: Functionality Suitability: Following are three different areas your software code should address: Correctness Completeness Appropriateness Out of above, correctness and completeness can directly be monitored and measured using bug tracking mechanisms. And, it is responsibility of both, developers and testers to make sure that these sub characteristics are complied. Developers achieve it by writing good unit tests, and test engineers achieve it by doing various different form of testing. From metrics perspectives, defect density is the area …
Software Quality Review – Scribe OAuth Library
Scribe OAuth Library helps you do quick OAuth based integration with some of the following web applications: Google Facebook Twitter LinkedIn and many more. You could find further details on following page on github. Following will present information on different perspectives: Structure Maintainability The duplication percentage isn’t very high. Duplication is one of the key criteria that reflects on the maintainability of the code. Higher the duplication, difficult is the code to maintain. Duplication is also considered as one of the code smells. Also, due to unavailability of unit tests in the source code bundle, I could not find the test coverage. Otherwise, test coverage depicts the testability of …
Test-Along Development (TAD): Unit testing technique
While talking to one of the client stakeholder, I came across this interesting term as Test-Along Development. Following are two different techniques I came across as common way of writing unit test: Test-driven development where we write unit tests first and then write enough code to make unit tests pass Write unit tests at the end once you are done with the development. Both of the above techniques presented enough challenges to the software developers. Some of them are following: Test-driven development: In agile development, in 2 week sprints, the design took much longer than 2-3 days. Thus, doing test-driven development was found to lead carry-overs for sprint given on …
They confuse between Module & Component
Ask software developers about what do they mean by a module and a component and, what is the difference between them? Ask them about how would they represent module or a component in their daily development activities? Most of the time the answer is quite confusing. Although they use these two words interchangeably, they remain confused on their actual meanings. Module can be defined as following: Represents a functionality Can be represented as a set of components Can have manifest file representing component configuration One or more modules make an application. Technically, a package can be termed as a module. There is something called as module oriented programming as well. …
How to Configure XDebug Debugger for Zend Studio
I have tried to configure many a times, Zend studio with XDebug due to various reasonss, most common being my computer getting crashed. And, everytime, I found myself reinventing the wheel after I got exhausted to figure out if I noted the configurations somewhere. This blog is for me to refer back whenever my laptop crashes again and I have to reconfigure Zend Studio, PHP and XDebug. Following entities will change: Downloading of XDebug DLL and placing the same in ext folder of php installation PHP INI file Zend Studio Debug Preferences Lets go over each one of them in detail: Download relevant XDebug dll from thos page. http://xdebug.org/download.php. The …
Software Quality Review: JActor
Overall Software Quality Rating: High (from Maintainability & Usability perspective) We reviewed JActor (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jactor/ ) in our software quality lab. Following is the overall structure of the software: The evaluation was done using manual and automated techniques. We were able to get findings related with following software quality characteristics: Maintainability: As per the available data, this has been measured in terms of duplications, and rules compliance. Ideally, test coverage would also have helped to determine the testability of the code. Our rating: High Maintainability Refer to the data below retrieved from Sonar code analysis: Note the duplications value of 0.4%. This is outstanding. Also, there were no blocker …
Multiple Classes with Single responsibility VS Single Class with Multiple Responsibilities
While taking a session with a set of mobile developers, one of them asked a question that made many of them curious. Why multiple classes when single class can do? The main reasoning for single class was that one would be able to save some lines of code. Also, one would be required to create just one object for multiple functionalities. Lets look at some of the key advantages of multiple classes, each one of them having single functionality. High in cohesion, and hence reduced coupling. This tends to make the class reusable. Lesser costly to change than single class. Following explains the cost structure related with a change: Let’s …
Unit Tests & What do they say?
Ask software developers about what do they mean by unit testing, and if they believe in it? And, the answer you get are some of the following: Unit testing is about writing tests for each of the method of the class. It is written only when you get some extra time after the code completion? Unit testing is done only when we are asked by our customers. Unit testing takes additional time and hence, done only if time permits. Test-driven development… What is that? Not sure if there are any benefits by writing unit tests? Test coverage… What is that? Why do we write unit tests when we are software …
What are Functional & Non-Functional Requirements?
When gathering requirements for software application/module development, requirements gathering remain as one of the key challenges for stakeholders at different levels including project manager, tech lead, software developers and test engineers. Interestingly, due to inefficient requirement gathering, most of the project fails. Following is definition of functional requirements as per wikipedia: In software engineering, a functional requirement defines a function of a software system or its component. A function is described as a set of inputs, the behavior, and outputs (see also software). Functional requirements may be calculations, technical details, data manipulation and processing and other specific functionality that define what a system is supposed to accomplish. Read further here. …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me