InfoQ Homepage Quality Content on InfoQ
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How To Complete Stories Without Leaving Bugs Behind
What can you do when unacceptable numbers of stories are "done" with development, but they still have many quality problems?
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Sonar 2.4: Architecture Constraint Rules and Maven 3 Support
The latest version of open source code quality management tool Sonar supports architecture constraint rules and custom dashboards. SonarSource team recently released Sonar 2.4 version which also includes Maven 3 support and an update center to install and upgrade Sonar plugins.
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How To Pay Down Technical Debt
Technical debt can be difficult to connect directly to customer value, but delivering customer value is what Agile processes are all about. So how can we track and reduce technical debt in an Agile development environment?
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Big Ball of Mud, Still the Most Popular Software Design
Big Ball of Mud, is a code jungle which is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy and connected by duct-tape. Over the years we have been introduced to various guidelines such as SOLID, GRASP and KISS amongst age old, high cohesion and low coupling to deal with this Mud. However, the situation still remains bleak and Big Ball of Mud seems to be a popular way to design and architect software.
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W3C Releases Unicorn Web Validation Tool
W3C has released Unicorn, a one-stop tool to help people improve the quality of their Web pages. Unicorn combines four popular tools, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, with a single interface.
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.NET and Azure Samples Showcase .NET Technologies Used in a Layered Architecture
Serena Yeoh, a Microsoft consultant and a contributor to Microsoft pattern&practices Application Architecture Guide, has created a Layered Architecture Sample for .NET 4.0 which was later ported to Azure, showcasing various .NET technologies (WPF, WCF, WF, ASP.NET, ADO.NET EF) used in an architecture based on the Layered Architecture design pattern.
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Agile Testing Challenge
Gerald Ford International Airport has a parking lot fee calculator and Matt Heusser noticed that it was buggy. So he issued a challenge to testers around the world: Find the bugs in ParcCalc. The respondents included James Bach, Selena Delesie and many others.
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What Color is your Backlog?
At the recent SDC conference in Wellington Prof Philippe Kruchten delivered a talk titled “What Color is Your Backlog”. The thrust of his talk is about bringing a focus on architecturally significant aspects of software into Agile projects, along with delivering the functional components of the system. He uses a color metaphor to illustrate the importance of addressing four types of work.
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Monetizing the Technical Debt
Most Agile teams recognize the evils associated with technical debt. Just like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments. These are paid in the form of extra effort required to maintain and enhance the software. Most Agilists recommend repaying the technical debt as early as possible. However, most Agile teams fail to monetize the technical debt.
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Temporary Code, Sustainable Code and Everything in Between
There is code which is well tested, well re-factored and built to last. There is also code which is planned to be thrown away in a few days. Between these two extremes, there is a lot of gray area. The code in this gray area is written with the presumption that it would be cleaned up later but is never done.
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To Comment or Not to Comment
Any developer has written at least one line of comment throughout his code. Some have written many comments in an attempt their code to be more explanatory. This article gathers some of the practices used in writing code comments.
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Continuous Deployment, In Practice
Continuous deployment has gained a recent buzz in the Lean-slanted "eliminate work-in-progess" movement. But while many may find this an intriguing and logically worthwhile objective, many less can visualize how this might actually be achieved. Ash Maurya helps to fill this gap by describing his experience with making it happen at his company.
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Stabilization Sprints, A Necessary Evil or Pure Waste?
Stabilization sprints are an additional number of sprints added to the end of the normal development cycle before shipping the product. As the name suggests, they’re usually added to shake down the product one last time and drive the last of the bugs. Do they belong in Agile environment or should "Done" be enough.
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Metrics for Ruby With Caliper
Caliper calculates various metrics – for example code duplication and complexity – for your Ruby code; all you need is a public Git repository.
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Dissecting Technical Debt
The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham. It describes the obligation that a development team incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that is easy to implement in the short run but has a larger negative impact in the long run. Agilists provide their view point on what should be considered a technical debt and how it could be classified.