The Mindset

Software development is a creative craft. Most of the people involved in software development rightfully consider themselves creative and thinking workers. Designing, implementing, and testing are all tasks which are both technical and creative. They require knowledge, skills, and discipline, but also innovation. If you are happy with how people on your team are doing […]

Every now and then, I hear architects and designers arguing that they cannot do a real analysis of the requirements, because the customer does not know exactly what he needs. This is often a reason for keeping things vague in the design of the product, or avoiding delving into the details. More often than not, […]

A couple of days ago I was thinking about a design problem. I was working on designing a fictional product for an upcoming design workshop I was creating. Since I usually try to create a notion of a real-world problem in my workshops, I had come up with the requirements for this fictional product, and […]

We have a lot of great techniques and tools for increasing the quality of our products in our Software Development Toolbox: design, unit testing, reviews, acceptance testing, etc. The difficult (and not always obvious) part is to use them wisely in the development process. 
In this posting, I want to concentrate on reviews and unit testing. […]

Every once in a while I come across a warning/error message, which leaves any reasonable user staring at his monitor not knowing what he has to do. Here’s the latest example, taken straight out of Microsoft’s® Visual Source Safe®.

Here are some facts that you have to know about the context of this warning: the […]

I’ve just came across this article warning us from automatically trusting the vast amount of information available to us (mainly from Internet sources).
My first reaction was: OK, this makes sense. What else is new?
My second reaction was: How can I trust the article I am currently reading to be legitimate? For all I […]

Many developers love to work in Java, .NET and other advanced development languages and platforms, because they think these environments free them from the need to take care of many unpleasant tasks, such as managing memory. Believe me when I say that I am all for it. I truly believe that using these development platforms […]

In my line of work I read a lot of technical articles. Many of them are published in official web sites of big companies. Every now and then I come across an article containing code examples that make me realize how well-rooted bad practices are in our industry. 
Take for example this article. The two code […]

If you regularly hear or use the term Usability in your work, you are probably a UI developer or a front-end Web developer. In general, the issue of usability becomes a concern the closer you get to your front-end user.
You’d be surprised to learn that the issue of usability is (or at least should be) […]

The quality of service you provide to your customers is an important part of how they preceive you and your products.
Here are two real stories. You be the judge:
"How Can You Expect It To Work?"
A couple of months ago, I bought a little software utility. I installed it on my PC from my admin […]