Open Kosmaczewski

In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project. Three developers were working in an ad hoc basis, creating a software application for an important client (a government office in Lausanne), without any kind of detailed formal specification, without any kind of design documentation, and with strong [...]

While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.
When in some situations it is not legally possible to use [...]

Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level [...]

Using Python’s own unittest package, here’s a small script that can iterate over your test suite to output a small, quick, nice list of the tests in your application:

import unittest

loader = unittest.TestLoader()
tests = loader.loadTestsFromName(’path.to.your.tests.package’)
for test in tests._tests:
print test._tests[0].__class__.__name__.replace(”Test”, “”)
for method in test._tests:
[...]

Those who read my blog know that I tend to write about software quality issues fairly often; particularly about open spaces and my aversion against them :)
I thought it was time to group all those entries into a Wordpress category of its own: “Quality”. Feel free to check the articles in there, and of course, [...]

Introduction
Total Quality Management is one of the founding pillars of modern mass-production economy, of which the software industry is by far the youngest (and most rebel) child. This article will provide a short discussion on some TQM principles and about their applicability to software projects.

Introduction
I strongly consider that the following three items are of high relevance for software project quality:

Developer workplace conditions
Tracking data of past projects
Management commitment to quality

In this article I will give an overview of them, providing some personal experience about each.

Startups and The Problem Of Premature Scalaculation
One of the reasons why startup founders so often spend too much too soon on scalability is that it is satisfying to do so. You can spend resources and have something to show for it. It is also easier to take credit for tangible progress. “Hey, we just [...]

If you haven’t tried git, you should. Git is a “distributed version control” system, that is, similar to Subversion with the big difference that… you do not need a server. There are only clients, any of them, and you can pull and push changes to and from other repositories from your project colleagues. The git [...]

Another open space! Wheeeeee!!!!!
We’re going to be building out the space to create a environment really optimized for our great engineers, product managers, web developers, designers and quality engineers to all sit and work together. Very high energy, with a lot of thought given to providing the best possible place to design & build [...]