The Mindset

Complexity is a significant factor in the cost of software development. The more complex code and design are, the greater the cost of developing, maintaining and extending the product is.
Now, I am not going to discuss what complex design and complex code are in this post. There are many metrics available for measuring complexity. […]

In a recent post, Johanna Rothman is talking about the need for pictures in design documents. Many design documents I’ve seen, however, suffer from having only UML diagrams with almost no plain English descriptions.
It’s true: a picture is worth a thousand words. But a picture cannot always tell the whole story. When it comes […]

Here’s a nice real-world story from which we can all learn a lot about usability, design and quality in general.
Everybody knows Google Desktop. As it happens, Google Desktop has a problem with re-indexing files if you move them from one location to another on your hard drive. According to this article, the solution is […]

There are two questions I am being asked quite often. The first question is how to structure code such that it will be easy to read and manipulate; the second question is how to read code effectively (in a review or as part of a maintenance task). Clearly, these two questions are related. In fact, […]

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, […]

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) […]

I’ve just installed Firefox 1.5 after long anticipation.
As you (hopefully) know, Firefox has great extension capabilities. An impressive collection of extensions written by individuals and third parties is available. The problem is that extensions built for previous versions of Firefox are not compatible with v1.5. Firefox is prepared for this mishap, and automatically checks […]

Have you ever heard (or asked) the question: “Why bother writing this…? Someone must have done this before!”.
The concept of taking a compiled piece of code and using it in different contexts was a great promise (and maybe it still is). However, it enfolds some problems with relying on a piece of code you can’t […]