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Posts filed under “Software Development”

Better Tests with Test Data Builders

When developing applications, often you need to set up some dummy data to test things without using real backend services. One particularly useful technique is described by Freeman and Pryce in their book »Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests«: Using the builder pattern to construct complex test data and improve code readability. Let’s say you […]

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Demystifying Kanban and Scrum

»Do not develop an attachment to any one weapon or any one school of fighting.« (Miyamoto Musashi) – this is directly cited from a very readable free pdf book by Henrik Kniberg & Mattias Skarin about two popular agile practices: Kanban and Scrum. Not only do the authors compare Kanban and Scrum to each other, […]

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Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering

Interesting article about “Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering” on the IEEE website.

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CommunityCommands: Command Recommendations for Software Applications

Actually, this should be one of my recent “Paper of the Month” posts but I’m not really fond of that title and the structure of my past posts any more. I’m going to keep on presenting new papers, which I find interesting and worthwhile, in a more informal style from now on (in software terms: […]

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Design by Contract framework for Flex development?

On InfoQ, there’s an interesting presentation by Greg Young on how Design by Contract (DBC) and Test Driven Development (TDD) can be combined and complement each other. Using a Microsoft framework for API contracts, he talks about how DBC can be used to eliminate a large number unit tests by setting up constraints in your […]

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“Flash Engineering” – A book about software engineering with the Flash Platform

Recently, the book “Flash Engineering” by Sven Busse (2009) has been published. While it is currently only available in German, English speakers might still want to read on, since it is quite unique compared to other books relating to that technology. I don’t know if an English version is being planned (if not, it would […]

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What is your level in the “Programmer Competency Matrix”?

Somehow I’ve came across the “Programmer Competency Matrix” – a table that shows the author’s expectations and requirements for different levels of skills in terms of computer science, software engineering, programming, experience and knowledge. The matrix is clearly geared towards “classic” software development and I believe a matrix for RIA developers, for example, would have […]

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Academic Flash and Paper of the Month

After almost a year of silence on this blog, I’m starting a new series of blog posts that cover serious topics that have both academic and practical relevance in terms of RIA development, user interface design or software design – basically topics that might be of interest for people involved in the design and development […]

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Eclipse/FDT shortcut sheet

After reading Xavi Beumala’s great article Optimizing Your Workflow with Eclipse and FDT at actionscript.com I quickly put together a sheet containing all the shortcuts mentioned in the article. There are mentioned a few very useful shortcuts I didn’t know and I thought it could be useful to have the most important ones on a […]

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Object-Oriented Design Heuristics

Here’s just a quick book recommendation: Searching for books on OOP I came across the book Object-Oriented Design Heuristics by Arthur J. Riel. It’s a great book on object-oriented design that deals with language-independet oo guidelines. It contains more than sixty heuristics and general information on object-oriented mechanisms and design which are useful for both […]

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