Basil Vandegriend: Professional Software Development

Problems with Typical Definitions of Project Success

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:11:01 +0000

My previous article discussed the importance of defining success as it relates to software projects and products. Now I want to look at some typical definitions of success and identify problems or short-comings with these definitions. From this analysis I aim to point the way towards a better definition of what success entails. Typical Definitions [...]

Avoiding Caching To Improve Hibernate Performance

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:18:54 +0000

I was recently doing some performance tuning and made the surprising discovery that doing less caching in Hibernate actually improved performance in a particular scenario. When I discovered the problem this seemed very counter-intuitive. In fact, my original design maximized the use of caching in order to improve performance, but the opposite happened in practice. [...]

The Importance of Defining Success

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:00:08 +0000

Can you define what makes a successful software development project or product? Do you know the criteria by which your current assignment will be judged a success? Does everyone associated with the project or product share the same definition? Defining what it means to be successful may seem obvious or trivial, but I expect that [...]

How to Become an Expert Developer

Basil Vandegriend — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:46:10 +0000

What if I told you there was only one activity you needed to do to become an expert, high-performing software developer? You might be doubtful of my claim. Yet this is exactly the finding reported in the book Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Across multiple professions research points to the same activity as being [...]

Presenting My Continuous Improvement Framework

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:39 +0000

I will be presenting my continuous improvement framework at Agile Edmonton at 12:00 noon on January 6, 2009 at the IBM Innovation Center (10044-108th Street Edmonton, Alberta). In addition to the framework itself I will be covering lessons learned from championing and implementing continuous improvement. I look forward to seeing you there!

Use Understood Methods Rule

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:19:56 +0000

Over the years I have refined the approach I use to write code. Recently I codified a key aspect of this approach as a practice I call the Use Understood Methods Rule. The basic formulation of the rule is quite simple: when coding a method only invoke other methods whose behavior you clearly understand [...]

Comparing Agile and Traditional Project Management

Basil Vandegriend — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:28:25 +0000

I just attended a great presentation about Agile project management by Mike Cottmeyer at Agile Edmonton's monthly meeting. What stood out for me were two comparisons Mike made between Agile project management and traditional approaches (e.g. waterfall project, PMI/PMP). Dealing with Uncertainty Mike characterized traditional approaches as trying to manage out uncertainty in the effort to achieve [...]

Test Driven Development – Benefits, Limitations, and Techniques

Basil Vandegriend — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:22:15 +0000

I wrote previously about the process I went through in adopting test driven development (TDD). In this article I discuss my experience with TDD: the benefits, the limitations, and the techniques I use when doing TDD. Benefits This section covers the benefits, as I see them, of doing TDD. This does not include the benefits of doing [...]

Lessons Learned Championing Continuous Improvement

Basil Vandegriend — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:30:10 +0000

For over one year now I have been championing continuous improvement across multiple teams. I have seen and struggled with various problems, some of which I have seen reoccur time and time again, and I have identified successful strategies for dealing with some of these issues. In this article I present my lessons learned in [...]

Adopting Test Driven Development

Basil Vandegriend — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:22:28 +0000

I have always been keen on using automated unit tests since I first heard about them almost a decade ago. I have known about test driven development (TDD) for almost as long but the practice of writing tests first before writing production code never really clicked for me when I first tried it years ago. [...]