Category: Software Engineering

Automated testing is something developers talk a lot about. But what is automated testing, and why is it important? Unit testing usually means testing a piece of software in isolation, away from the rest of the code base. Sometimes this entire topic falls under the broad heading of unit testing. Unit testing typically doesn’t include…

Dave Kovic is my favorite modern president. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the real president; President Mitchell was the real president. Xamarin allows us to create mobile applications that appear to be fake applications. But unlike Dave, Xamarin apps are real. Xamarin.Forms allows you to write one application that runs on both iOS and Android. The goal…

We have spent a good amount of time discussing database change control. Why? Why should we care? Why not just let people manually deploy things to SQL? The answer is four-fold: Repeatability Trackability Maintainability Ties application code to the database code Repeatability Ideally, we want the ability to quickly rebuild our environments. We want a…

Search is an essential part of any e-commerce application. If you don’t believe me, go to amazon.com. How hard is it to find the search box? Pretty easy, right? If search is essential, we need to make it work pretty well in our applications. Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the…

Years ago, we had something called ASMX web services. While I wouldn’t want to go back to those, they did have some advantages over the current way many APIs are created. Back in the ASMX days, you got a pretty well-defined contract for interacting with web services. Today if someone is setting up a Web…

#10 – The build server always has a few failing tests Unit tests are a valuable piece to a layered approach to quality. But unit tests only have value if people see them as needing to always pass. The moment people stop caring about failing unit tests, they have lost their value.   #9 –…

Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the real-world development skills that will make them more productive and effective. Part of the class is Doug and I covering several topics, but we try to have a real focus on actually doing things. We want students to develop skill and knowledge, which takes…

As we look at arguments we care too much about, one of those would be “should we use a schema (or model) based solution database change control, or should we store off deltas?” First off, source control is useful, and not just for our application code. Storing the database somewhere in source control along with…