12 August 2013
Agile does not necessarily lend itself to management reporting. The few metrics it exposes are designed to support internal planning rather than external measurement. It can be tempting to re-purpose velocity as a measure of productivity, though this will only distort team planning without saying anything meaningful.
16 July 2013
Change is an inevitable and even desirable part of distributed development. Managing the impact of that change is the difficult part, particularly when change affects the service interfaces that bind a distributed platform together.
17 June 2013
Netflix have closed their OData catalogue and EBay seem to have quietly put their implementation out to grass. With a shrinking ecosystem and no marquee services, does Microsoft’s data standard have a future?
4 June 2013
Sharing services and APIs can appeal to a desire to reduce duplication and improve development efficiency. It’s a worthy ambition though the journey there can be littered with costly traps for the unwary.
21 May 2013
A generic repository is often used with the entity framework to speed up the process of creating a data layer. In most cases this is a generalization too far and it can be a trap for lazy developers.
22 April 2013
Azure’s Brokered Message API provides a basic set of methods that make it easy to start sending and receiving messages through the Azure Service Bus. The problem is that it doesn’t do much to provide some of the basic scaffolding required by a serviceable messaging client.
16 March 2013
Log4net provides decent logging performance out of the box, but you’ll need to consider asynchronous appending if you want more serious throughput or logging to a shared resource.
22 February 2013
Shared databases risk turning into performance bottlenecks that encourage close-coupling and create a single point of failure. There’s no justification for using them to integrate processes and applications.
15 January 2013
Large-scale development increasingly involves distributed teams as organizations seek to manage costs and leverage resources on a global scale. However, sharing code between distant development teams gives rise to problems that can only be addressed in part by processes and tools. You also need teams to communicate directly and build trust.
8 January 2013
Technology decisions should not be made in isolation, particularly when you are trying to weigh up building a solution or buying a third party platform.
17 December 2012
REST is more of an architectural style than a set of standards. That said, a service should follow certain conventions if it is to be predictable and simple to work with.
6 November 2012
CRUD-based repositories may appear convenient but they can make for poor service interfaces as well as giving rise to a lot of unnecessary boiler-plate code.
3 September 2012
Technical debt may be a great metaphor to describe the corrosive effect of quick and dirty design decisions, but it can be difficult to identify, measure and manage.
2 July 2012
Development teams can struggle with dependency injection, often because they don’t have a clear understanding of how best to use it.
30 April 2012
Developers and architects like to build things, so their initial impulse is often to flatten the place, lay some stronger foundations and build something impressive. It can be difficult to get them excited about incremental innovation, even when this is generally the most sensible approach from both a technical and commercial perspective.