Just as Supportability, Maintainability is one of these Non Functional Requirements, that is or should be required from every software development project. So what does that mean? Wikipedia defines it as
the ease with which a software product can be modified in order to:
correct defects
meet new requirements
make future maintenance easier, or
cope with a changed environment;
Wow, that’s [...]
When reading the specification of a piece of software to be written, you are bound to find some non functional requirements. Among these there will be, or at least should be Supportability. But what the heck does that mean? How do you install supportability? Let me present some ideas, what you can do to improve [...]
For about a decade now everybody in IT talks about Agile, but hardly anybody else does. There is a somewhat similar concept of ‘Lean’ in other industries, but hardly anybody in a ‘real’ industry considers things like ‘release early’ a viable strategy. And that’s a good thing. I don’t want a second iteration car. “Ooops [...]
In about one of two projects the customer comes up with the requirement of ‘historization’ of data. And more often then not this lead to an unholy back and forth of discussions, prototypes and complaining. The reason for this as far as I can tell is: This is not a well defined requirement. It can [...]
Software development has been compared to many things. I’d like to propose another comparison: Evolution.
Why another metaphor?
A metaphor enables you to think about a problem in a different way, thus possibly gaining new insight. It is also useful for explaining something to someone who otherwise wouldn’t understand what you are talking about. Or to use [...]
Many companies lately come to the conclusion, that they have to do something about this social web thingy. But when I listen to the discussions, I feel like traveling back in time to the end of the last millenium, when everybody thought the web (release 1.0 at that time) was the way to print money. [...]
Trees are everywhere in software! The file system is a tree structure, menus form a tree structure, the archive widget on the right side of this blog is a tree structure. We use trees all the time. And very often they get completely messed up. I’d say 9 out of 10 project folders are a [...]
When reading blogs you get the impression, that everybody works in high end environments, using the latest greatest distributed version control system. Writing tons of tests, before they even dream about writing actual code and of course the tests a executed by the continuous integration system after every commit, which happens about 30 times per [...]
Are you aware that I know a lot about you? You don’t believe me? Here you go: You are smart! You are constantly trying to improve your skills! You are probably better at what you do for a living than most of your colleagues!
Wow, how did I do that? Simple: You are reading my blog. [...]
In a late blog post Stephan Schmidt vents his problems with hibernate and declares “ORMs are a thing of the past”
I agree to some extend:
- The SQL generated by Hibernate by default is horrible. Huge joins, with hundreds of columns, many unneeded.
- Annotations feel like dirt in your code, and maintaining XML mappings is just [...]