Surfsoft Consulting Blog » Best Practice

Build Your Software on Firm Foundations…

Phil — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:22:00 +0000

What makes for a successful software development project? I was mulling over a number of projects I had been involved with in the past, some very successful, some not so, and thinking about the key differences between the two. There are any number of aspects that can be considered – the quality of project management, …

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Phil — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:14:40 +0000

The SANS Institute has published a list of the top 25 most dangerous programming errors and reading through the list was pretty much like meeting a bunch of old friends. Such lists may seem self evident to some but that doesn’t stop development teams falling into the same traps today that were being fallen into …

Method Contracts! Method Contracts! Method Contracts!

Phil — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:23:00 +0000

I recently spent a few days back-filling test code to help a team meet one of its its quality objectives – namely unit test coverage – and the scany level of documentation within the code re-enforced my views on properly documenting the contract of a method. The methods I wrote tests for had the minimum …

Testing, testing

Phil — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:23:00 +0000

There’s a lot to be said for test driven development. Next to documenting the code, testing is the other bane of a developer’s life that prevents them from moving on and doing other, ‘more interesting’ work. All the better then that the approach to writing code should include the writing of test cases. Write some …