Nigel Cheshire

Nigel Cheshire's Blog A couple of weeks or so after launch, I thought it might be fun to scout around and find out whether iPhone users are experiencing significant software problems with the device or not. I haven’t traded my Blackberry for an iPhone (yet), but a couple of... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog From the many reports of software glitches this week, (including an outage at all-the-rage social networking site Facebook), I decided to focus on a couple of interesting (to me, anyway) stories that have one thing in common: speed. The world of Formula One ... (more)

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 o... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog SYS-CON.TV just posted an interview that Roger Strukhoff did with me at JavaOne last month. While there's not too much you can say about software quality in 9 or 10 minutes, I did drop a few hints about what we are working on here at Enerjy, which we are pr... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog The folks at Stelligent entered the brave new world of vidcasting with an interview with Levent Gurses, previewing his presentation at the Better Software Conference. Levent talks about the key Eclipse plug-ins that help track code quality metrics. In partic... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Infoworld ran a story yesterday on comments made by Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie. “The problem is,” said Mundie, “that software development is an important endeavor but it has not matured as an engineering ... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog A quick thought for a Friday afternoon. Mary Jo Foley reports at ZDNet that Microsoft is starting work on the “Kitchen Client” version of windows. “Among the features Microsoft is planning to make part of its forthcoming kitchen computing e... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog David Seruyange pointed me to a great presentation by Yahoo! Javascript Architect Douglas Crockford on software quality. At least, “Quality” is the title of the presentation, but in fact Crockford gives a wonderful history lesson, showing how we ... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Pair programming is a concept that has been around for a while and something I have heard good things about, although we have never actually come across any customers using it. This is probably because, in many organizations, pair programming would be too ea... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Amiram Hayardeny wrote a thought-provoking post yesterday in which he applies the broken window theory to software quality. The broken window theory suggests that neighborhoods where minor evidence of decay (broken windows, deteriorating building exteriors, ... (more)

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 ... (more)

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 remind... (more)

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 develo... (more)

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, ... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog Considering the main headline on our web site is “What gets measured gets managed”, I was interested to read Chris Loosley's post today considering whether the common claim that “you can’t manage what you can’t (or don’t) ... (more)

Gojko Adzic has a great post today on the application of the “Poka-Yoke” principle to software development. I’d bever heard of Poka-Yoke before, but it looks like it's another application of a Japanese manufacturing technique to software development. Personally,... (more)

Nigel Cheshire's Blog I’m at JavaOne this week, where the talk from Sun is all about mobile, or JavaFX and JavaFX Script. I’m not sure the world needs another scripting language, but then what do I know? I know it's a bit off-topic, but the thing that struck me about J... (more)

In an article in the October edition of the FTP Webzine "Upside" Peter Varhol laments the trend toward per-developer metrics in the software development process. "Individual developer data is stored and available to be manipulated in less than honorable ways," he says, "and there... (more)

Intellectually everyone understands that improving code quality is a good thing. After all, we know bad quality when we see it. (Anyone old enough can cast his or her mind back to the late '80s and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0.) But we also know that there comes a point where t... (more)

Show me code written by ten developers and I'll show you ten different coding styles. So why try to develop and enforce coding standards? Who cares what a program looks like as long as it works? The primary reason for adopting coding standards is to make it easier for developers... (more)