3 Misuses of Code Comments

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, July 1, 2009 @ 7:44 am

Photo Credit: by dpascoe

Not many people talk about good practices to use for comments in code. Many people see them as an extra or freebie, so not a lot of thought gets put into them. The truth is, though, that comments are a great tool for giving insight into the thought process when the code was being written. Unfortunately like any tool, comments can be misused.

Here are three of the most common misuses of comments which I tend to run into.

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Digging a Hole and Covering it with Leaves — The Software Development Version

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 30, 2009 @ 5:30 am

photo credit: Marco Arment

Whenever I hear the plan uttered (and in my Wall Street consulting days, I heard this a lot), that we should build an HTML (or Flash) prototype, impress the client and then fill in the back end, an unwanted image comes to mind. We're digging a hole (the missing 80% of the back end) and covering it with leaves (the HTML prototype) in the hopes that the client will fall in (impressing the client).

No, this isn't a rant about HTML, Flash or paper prototypes. Those have their place, to be sure. We use them every day in our own software development practice, but they have a short lifespan -- usually less than an iteration on the way to delivering the actual feature that it is prototyping. But when the prototype takes on a life of it's own and becomes a long-term deliverable, that's when you run into problems. What are these problems? They aren't as numerous as fall leaves, but there are plenty.

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The Importance of User Experience - Do You Understand It in Your Bones?

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, June 29, 2009 @ 6:51 am

Business Week had an article earlier this week on Cloud Computing that made a complete hash of the subject. However, there was one paragraph that was right on the money:

Apple and Google understand in their bones that simplicity and ease of use are essential to broad adoption of products and services. That lesson doesn't come so naturally to Microsoft and IBM.

That's why we integrate user experience design into the agile development process, and that's why we advise our clients to release the simplest software they can early, so they can learn from real user feedback and continue to make improvements based on that learning.

It's like John Gruber writes over at Daring Fireball:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
—John Gall

If there’s a formula to Apple’s success over the past 10 years, that’s it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

Do you understand that in your bones?

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What’s In Your Dock: iPhone edition

Noel Rappin, Friday, June 26, 2009 @ 2:29 pm

It's been a while since I've been desparate enough to had a chance to do a nice "what's in your toolbox" kind of post. In honor of the iPhone 3.0 upgrade, and Steve Jobs' liver, let's do an iPhone-toolbox post.

I'm unabashedly happy with my phone, because it's strengths and weaknesses mesh pretty well with my actual needs. It's not that great a phone, but I don't use the phone that much. On the other hand, there's never been a better gizmo for whiling away a long train commute.

So, here's some stuff I use:

Instapaper (free light version, $9.99 pro version currently on sale for $4.99)

Instapaper has probably changed my web reading habits more than any other app since I started using RSS readers. It's so simple that its almost hard to believe how useful it is. When I come across an article on the web I want to save for later, I click a bookmarklet. Later, launching Instapaper on the phone, the article shows up, with the images stripped away, and the text presented in a reader friendly format. (Sometimes you can help Instapaper out by invoking it from the printer-friendly version of a page...)

Using Instapaper has become kind of second nature -- I always have a few articles ready to go. The Pro version adds a few nice features, including control of the display font and the ability to scroll the article by tilting the phone. The tilt-scroll sounds like you'll need to be a gymnast or something to read an article, but in practice it's a super-clean interface for reading long articles and letting the text scroll at your reading speed. Great app.

Birdhouse ($3.99)

Very well designed little app for what seems like a dumb use case -- saving drafts of posts intended for Twitter. I mean, how much do you need to polish that tweet about the ham sandwich you had for lunch, amirite?

But, if you are trying to do a tip a day on Twitter (@railsrx), then having a nice place to store up ideas for future tips is great. The app also works as a slightly structured note-taking app, since it can email it's existing draft population back to you.

Stanza / Kindle (Free)

The two leading general-purpose eBook readers, both of them are easy to use, and manage the task of making text readable on an iPhone. It'd be nice if there was some consistency in formats between the two apps, and also if you could buy books directly from the Kindle App (presumably that's coming).

MLB At Bat ($9.99)

Obviously only if you are a baseball fan, but the app gives you access to live box score and play-by-play data, live audio stream of radio broadcast, video highlights, special goodies like condensed game videos a few hours after games and, plus live video streaming on a currently limited basis. That's a lot of stuff. Add in the fact that the app is pretty enough to have won an Apple Design Award, and it's a pretty fabulous package.

Twitteriffic (Free lite, $3.99 no-ads)

There are something like a zillion Twitter clients on the iPhone at last count, and which one to pick is basically idiosyncratic. It's a mark of how fast iPhone development is going that Twitteriffic 1.0 won an Apple Design Award in 2008 and was completely blown away by newer clients six months later before regaining strong status with the 2.0 release. I find this has a nice blend of features and interface. (Tweetie, which is my desktop client, is also very good on the iPhone).

Of course, this all sounds serious -- the big winners on the iPhone have all been games, there are all kinds of inexpensive, addictive little games I play. Here are a few: Defender Chronicles, The Creeps, Drop 7, Flight Control, Frenzic, Galcon, Peggle, Strategery.

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ChicagoRuby meeting ‘Test Prescriptions’ recap

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 @ 12:41 pm

The ChicagoRuby users group (not to be confused with chirb.org another great Chicago Ruby user group) held their second meeting at their downtown location.

While the meetings out in Elmhurst are always informative and helpful,  the downtown location may allow for a bigger crowd, and the weekday time might work better for more people. Plus, the Illinois Technology Association - Tech Nexus is right next to Union Station which works great for people that still have to go out to the suburbs.

Noel Rappin's talk covered some of the most common questions he gets through the Pathfinder Development Blog, and his own site RailsPrescriptions site RailsRX.com dedicated exclusivly to testing.

There's too much detail to cover here, but at a high-level, Noel covered:

• The why, how, when, and where questions that make the foundation of a good testing approach
• Testing techniques for legacy projects
• A good review of the different testing frameworks, what their differences are, and some discussion about each (test::unit, shoulda, rspec, cucumber)
• A solid review of different factory tools that go beyond standard fixtures (Factory Girl, Fixture Replacement, Machinist, and Object Daddy)
• Strategies for migrating from Fixtures
• Differences between the mocking frameworks:  Flexmock, mocha, rspec, and RR (double ruby)
• Finding the right balance, and avoiding the pitfalls of 'over mocking'
• Cucumber testing workflow (and where cucumber doesn't work well)

The audience seemed to have a wide range of experience, but all had opinions to share about what they've learned about testing.  After the talk everyone seemed fell into small groups to network and exchange ideas and contact info, and a group gathered around Ray and Noel as they tossed around some ideas on potential future meeting topics "Ruby IDE/Editor review", "Rails Jumpstart", "Coding Dojo".

The organizers took a stab at hosting the meeting virtually over gotomeeting (not sure if it was recorded or not).

Their next meeting is scheduled for July 18th, details can be found in their meetup.com group.

The organizers of the ChicagoRuby.com group are also the organizers of the 2nd annual WindyCityRails Conference right here in Chicago, on Sept, 12th, which Noel will be presenting at.

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Mowing the grass, Revisited

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 @ 12:17 am

photo credit: great_sea

A few weeks ago Alice Toth and I had a conversation about how we can better serve our clients, and while we normally delve into project efficiencies like communication, developer training, and good QA practices, this time we both concluded that we need to do a better job of helping our clients reach their goals in the most efficient way possible, and sometimes that means talking them 'down' from the specific implementation idea they have, and finding a faster way to get there.

I said that one of our challenges is that sometimes our clients feel they've hired us to just  'Mow the Grass', not discuss the landscape architecture, so we're not always in a place to be heard when it comes to discussing the fundamentals of a project.  Alice wrote a nice post about what 'Just Mow the Grass' meant to her, and the strategy she's devised to find a nice middle ground.

Here's how I see it

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Agile Fundamentals: The Feedback Loop

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 @ 2:28 pm

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. -- John Wooden

photo credit: mister b 1138

A few weeks ago I had a discussion with some colleagues on the adoption of Agile within large corporations. The consensus was that Agile was almost always adapted rather than adopted -- that is, companies exclude those practices that conflict with corporate culture, modify those that seem too impractical or wasteful, and sometimes substitute those internal practices that seem a decent and familiar substitute.

Various schools of Agile thought have different reactions to this adaptation, all negative. The XP folks particularly don't like it.

These [thirteen] practices support one another...and thus care should be taken when modifying any of them, or deciding not to include one or more of these practices in a project.

I agree that it definitely helps to follow a particular Agile approach closely in the beginning. Once you have the basics down, you can start to improvise. But it helps knowing the fundamental principle which, in my opinion, underlies all of the agile practices, no matter what the flavor. So, the first three commandments of Agile software development are:

1. Feedback loop
2. Feedback loop
3. Feedback loop

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Why I love the Internet, part 87

Matt Nolker, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 @ 11:34 am

Check out the reader comment on this characteristically astute Dvorak screed from 2007. Kudos to MarketWatch for giving readers a voice equal in visual prominence to the headline of the column. Click to view in all its full-sized glory.

via Daring Fireball.

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Integrating Design and Agile Development

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, June 22, 2009 @ 5:04 pm

If you liked my colleague Alice Toth's presentation on Agile Requirements, you'll like her talk on integrating design and agile development:

AGILE AND ME a story with just enough documentation.

A typical waterfall project produces pages and page of end-to-end requirements for the entire project as it is envisioned (but not necessarily as it will be built). The people compiling these requirements are, of course, part of an assembly with only the most cursory involvement with others outside their department. After all 9,238 lbs. of paper are heaved over the wall with a hearty “good luck!” and a cheery wave, the silos are once again in place and silence is golden.

While agile was taking hold of development, design was still stuck in the waterfall method. So why not blend the two and run the entire project in an agile fashion, starting with requirements? Here's how we do it at Pathfinder:

Like what you see? Check out more of Pathfinder's presentations, whitepapers and articles here.

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Upcoming Pathfinder Appearances

Noel Rappin, Friday, June 19, 2009 @ 8:14 am

Windy City Rails is September 12, 2009

Here are a couple of upcoming Ruby and Rails-based appearances by Pathfinder personnel:

On Tuesday, June 23, Noel Rappin (referring to himself in the third person) will be the guest speaker at the Chicago Ruby.org monthly meeting. The meeting starts at 6:00 at Chicago Ruby's downtown loop meeting location, see the link for details. The working title of my talk is "I'd Like To Start Testing. Now What?" and it'll be an informal discussion of testing tools and good practice.

The schedule for WindyCityRails was announced this week. The conference is September 12, 2009 at the Westin Chicago River North. John McCaffrey from Pathfinder will be presenting "Super-easy PDF Generation with Prawn and Prawnto", and I'll be up there with "How To Test Absolutely Anything".

Other speakers include Ryan Singer from 37signals, Ben Scofield from Viget Labs, and Yehuda Katz from Engine Yard.

Registration through August 1st is $99, there are a couple of tutorial sessions also available for purchase.

This was a very well-run regional conference last year, and I'm excited for this year's edition. Hope to see you there.

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What value isn’t

Matt Nolker, Thursday, June 18, 2009 @ 10:56 am

"I have tried Campfire, and I'm still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don't see the value proposition there." Source

With apologies to Mike Godwin, I like to think of the following as Nolker's Law: As any technical discussion of a web 2.0 product grows longer, the probability of a claim that it can be built in a weekend approaches 1.

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How to learn a new programming language or framework

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 @ 10:03 am

While never untrue, it is more of a necessity now, that a programmer should know more than just one language or framework. After being a focussed Java/J2EE developer for a long time since college, in the last couple of years, I plunged into .NET, Ruby/Rails and then Javascript/prototype/jQuery etc and now onto groovy/grails. With name like Erlang, Scala, Compass, git, blueprint, flex flying around us everywhere, it can be overwhelming and we need a plan to pick, peruse, acquire them. Here is a list of things I do when learning a new skill.

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5 things I can do with my windows mobile phone that you can’t do with your iPhone

John McCaffrey, Tuesday, June 16, 2009 @ 6:15 pm

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GWTUML - Just Enough UML for Wikis

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 16, 2009 @ 9:27 am

Florian Mounier has spent the last six months developing GWT UML, a slick little UML diagramming tool written in, obviously, GWT. It's smooth, good looking, supports class, object and sequence diagrams. You can save your diagram as a url or export it to an SVG. You wouldn't try to do model driven development with it, but for embedding in a development wiki, this thing could rock.

You can find more information at the google code project and check out a demo here.

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37 Signals on Launching Softly

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, June 16, 2009 @ 8:13 am

Over at Signal vs. Noise, sound advice on the advantages of launching softly:

... You don’t need a big bang – slow evolution is what you want. Unless you absolutely must “open wide,” abandon the mass introduction strategy. Instead, launch softly.

Restaurants start off by serving friends and family before they invite the media.

Movie studios use test screenings to fine tune movies. The people behind the scenes know that until you get into the test screenings and see what people really think, you just never know.

Likewise, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock try out jokes in small clubs before hitting arenas...

Soft launching lets you tweak and revise. You get the word out there and you gauge interest. You know what works and what doesn’t.

Plus, you get to make mistakes while you’re still in the shadows. Messing up in front of a smaller crowd means you’ll be better off when the bright lights eventually do shine upon you.

Dead on, as usual, from the authors of Getting Real.  It's what we advise clients and prospects, and when they follow it, their chances of success dramatically increase.

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