Yesterday, I was asked what I saw as the most important factors to ensure the development of quality software. What I cited was good design, good implementation following good standards, and good testing. On the testing end, I have a rule-of-thumb that says that at least 85% of the code should be covered with unit [...]

A recent report from the SEI confirms once more what I have been saying for a few years now: security is a design-time concern as much as it is a concern at any other time during the application life-cycle. The very architecture of the application should take security into account from the outset, and that [...]

I just finished reading a report by the Software Engineering Institute that accomplishes something that earlier literature, including “SCRUM Meets CMMi – Agility and discipline combined” didn’t accomplish: it takes a rational step back from both methods, shows where they’re from and why they’re different, how much of that difference is real and where the [...]

I’m pretty sure that I’m not the first one to run into this, so I thought I’d blog how this works. As I said earlier, one of my clients uses CentOS 5.2 in their production environment, so I need a CentOS 5.2 development server set up. I use Git for all projects I can use [...]

Sometimes, techies and marketers – and especially people who are both – can get very out-of-touch with the real world and start spewing out nonsense like this: The web has dramatically changed the software industry over the past 15 years. Today it’s hard to imagine business without the web. Nearly all businesses have or are [...]

I promised I wouldn’t talk about this blog too much on the blog, and I promise I won’t do this often, but I thought it might be a good idea to notice that I’ve made a few minor changes. First of all, the theme has changed. I think this one ergonomically a wee bit better [...]

One of my clients uses CentOS for the production platform of their (web) application (written in PHP). They’ve asked me to take over the development and maintenance of their web application, so, naturally, I set up a new server with CentOS 5.2, rather than the Debian installation I would normally use. I like Debian for [...]

I guess it’s not a secret: I’m looking for a job, either short-term or long-term, so I put my CV on a few websites. I got called by head-hunters twice this week: once for a contract to start on Monday (I’m busy until the end of September/the beginning of October so I told ‘em I [...]

Any problem is an invitation to find a solution. Any solution – at least in my line of work – is an amalgam of concrete implementations of abstract concepts. Each of those implementations may or may not meet the requirements just like any of those concepts may or may not be the right one for [...]

I first started working with SQL several years ago: MySQL was still in the 3.x versions, so I didnt use any stored procs, transactions, etc. Most of the business logic around the data was written in Perl. Though it was a fun time in many respects, I dont miss the limitations of MySQL one bit. [...]