Nigel Cheshire

Nigel Cheshire's Blog I was in a meeting with a customer earlier this week, discussing some of the changes that we see in development teams that start a metrics program and begin to measure the results. I used the phrase “change in the culture and behaviors” of development. In most cases, the skills are there, but the reason best practices aren’t being adhered to, or unit tests aren’t being written has more to do with that fact that there is no measurable goal to work toward in these areas. One of the architects in the meeting made an insightful reference to Carnegie Mellon's Personal Software Process (PSP). While the PSP represents a good, structured framework for changing “culture and behaviors”, we have never come across a development team that is using it, despite its having been around since 1998. There's no doubt that a chan... (more)

Speaking at Real-World Java Seminar Next Week

Nigel Cheshire's Blog I’ll be speaking at SYS-CON's Real-World Java one-day seminar in New York City next Monday, August 13. Despite the fact that it's August, it looks like they have lined up an interesting panel of speakers for the day, including sessions by Yakov Fain on using Flex with Java (that’ll be interesting to me) as well as sessions by Sun on Java 6.0 and a panel session on Java 7.0. The title of my session is “Code Quality: Pay Now or Pay Later”, and I will be talking about why code quality is an issue that many sweep under the rug, why we s... (more)

JavaOne - TDD Controversy

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Reading Joseph Ottinger’s blog; “Scary thought: maybe those who say they can’t do TDD are right” I would think that any development manager or newbie looking to implement TDD would be pretty concerned about some of the comments made, particularly this one: “Most developers do *no* TDD at all. It's about time we started listening to these people instead of trying to lecture them.” Obviously this is a controversial issue. It can quickly degenerate into a tirade of arguments about why TDD would or would not work in certain or... (more)

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width!

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width" was the title of a British TV sitcom in the late 60's (yes, I really am that old), which has nothing to do with Java software development. Or does it? The more I talk to people about the issue of Java software quality, the more I am reminded of the name of that seemingly ridiculous TV show. It seems to me that however much we talk about the need for quality in software development, it's an issue that takes a backseat to the "width" - by which I mean the number of feature requests that get crammed into our development projects. Many years ... (more)

Digg Contest Sparks Visualization Ideas

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Having a particular interest in data visualization (more on how that relates to what we are doing here later), I was browsing around the Digg API visualization contest today. The many different approaches to building a meaningful representation of a dynamic data set made me realize that there are probably as many ways to solve that problem as there are people willing to build a solution (some wackier than others!). Ultimately, what struck me about the different approaches to the problem is that sometimes, the simplest approach is the best. Although I didn&rsq... (more)