Software development process

Code complete != ship ready

Posted on by AbdulFattaah Popoola

I used to work for a team where whenever an engineer said he was done, the next question would invariably be are you ‘done done‘?

Do you find yourself always under-estimating the amount of time needed to complete some software project? Does it take more time than what you planned? Or do you say you are done but need to change just one small feature.

Accurate estimation is difficult but again an unclear definition of what done means also contributes to this. So what does done mean?

Checklists and Processes

Boeing introduced preflight checklists in 1935 after a prototype crash killed two pilots. Investigations revealed that they had forgotten to carry out a critical step before takeoff. Thus, the fix was to introduce a preflight checklist to avoid this (they learnt from the mistake and became better for it).

A catastrophic software failure can have disastrous outcomes – it is expensive, can harm (imagine if embedded car software were to fail), and is bad PR for the company (how many security breaches have you heard of in recent times?).

So, do we need such heavy formal checklists for software development? Some companies require standardized processes while others don’t. However, it is always good to have a mental model of the various stages of the software shipping pipeline.

Here is a checklist to guide you through the various phases of done; you can now know which stage you are at any given point in time.

1. Code complete

You have written the code (and hopefully added unit tests) but have not done any deep testing. This is what most developers erroneously refer to as done. No, code complete does not mean done. It is the first milestone in a long journey.

Always have tests for code completion

2. Test complete

Thorough exploratory testing of the feature has been carried out. This covers extreme conditions, edge cases and load/performance scenarios.

It’s an exercise in futility to attempt to find all bugs and exercise all possible code paths. Rather, the goal of testing is to reduce the chances of a user finding a glaring simple-to-discover error that should have been found earlier. It also surfaces other issues (e.g usability, security holes etc.) that might have been latent.

Every discovered bug should ideally be fixed and a unit test added to prevent future regressions. However, not all bugs are fixable (and those turn into features…). Early knowledge of these issues enable developers to proactively prepare mitigation plans, workarounds and also notify users.

If you don’t have dedicated testers (they are worth their weight in gold and very good); you  can use James Whittaker’s testing tours method to get some fun while doing this and also ensure a good coverage.

3. Integration complete

You have completed the various isolated features, written unit tests and also done exploratory testing. You have a high confidence in each of the individual features however your components work exactly like the similitude below:

So get to it and do integration of all the disparate components and ensure that things still work as they should. More testing, more discussions with collaborating software engineers and maybe some more glue code.

Why do I keep emphasizing on testing? Have you ever had a bad experience with some software? It’s nearly always a quality issue.

4. Ship ready

This is the cross your t’s and dot your i’s moment; verify that the code solves the problem, issues discovered during testing have been fixed and components have been integrated. Code complete, test complete and integration complete? Great, time to ship.

Some organizations enforce strict limits on some parameters like performance, security, reliability and compliance. If so, you should do another pass to ensure that your software meets these criteria.

The product owner / customer likes the software and viola! Your software piece rolls out like a new car off the production line.

5. Shipped (maintenance ready)

Software is never done. When it is shipped, customers would start using it in ways you never imagined and will find issues. Some can be petty – for example, can you change move this button by 0.2 pixels? While others would be pretty serious stuff.

In maintenance mode, the software already exists but there are new bugs to fix, new feature extensions to make and behavioural modifications to make.

And when you think it’s all done, then maybe it’s time to release a new version. Start at number 1 again.

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Taking the PAIN out of coding

Posted on by AbdulFattaah Popoola

Over the years, I have learnt some tricks and picked up some lessons while writing code. Most were learnt the hard way, so I decided to share a couple of tips on how to avoid development pitfalls.

Meticulous Planning and Design

One of the most difficult lessons I learnt in software development was not to rush into code; I used to jump impulsively into software projects and start hacking away at code without planning fully. And as you can bet, the thrill of coding soon evaporated when I got bogged down by messy code. Sadly, many projects of mine met their nemesis this way.

Now, I am just too lazy or maybe too battle-scared to do that; I mostly write out a high level system design document (usually a single page or two) describing all the major features. Next, I run through everything to know that the various components and interfaces are logically valid and try the edge cases. Only when I am satisfied with this do I start writing code.

Alhamdulilah, I think I write cleaner, more modular and better designed code this way. For example, I recently had to extend an experimental framework I wrote a couple of months back; surprisingly I was able to make all major changes in less than two hours. Better still, nothing broke when I ran the framework again!

A dev lead once told me coding is the easiest part of software development… I think I agree with him…

Do it fast and dirty, then clean up

I started using EmberJS last year for a web project. EmberJS is a really cool framework and reduces the amount of boilerplate code you have to write: it’s so powerful that some things seem magical. However, EmberJS has a really steep learning curve.

As usual, I was trying to write perfect code at my first attempt, did I succeed? Your guess is as good as mine. I got so frustrated that I started hating EmberJS, the project and everything remotely related to the project. :)

Before giving up, I decided to have one more go at it; my new approach involved ignoring all standards and good practices until I got something to work. And that was it, I soon got ‘something’ that looked like a working web application running. One day, while working on the ‘bad’ code, I had an epiphany. In a flash, I suddenly knew what I was doing wrong. Following standards and practices was relatively easy afterwards.

Looking back, I realize that if I was bent on doing it perfectly at the first go I most probably wouldn’t have gotten to this point. Oh by the way, EmberJS got a new release so my code is obsolete again. :P

Clean up the code from step 2 above X more times

This is a part of development I don’t think I really like but it is essential for maintenance. You have to go back through the code (yes, your code; you ain’t gonna make life miserable for the developer inheriting your codebase). Refactor all duplicated, extraneous and obscure pieces of code ruthlessly. Most importantly, improve the readability of the code (yes, readability is REALLY important – make it read like a good novel if possible à la Shakespeare or Dickens).

I also keep a running list of all the hacks I make as I go about writing code in step 2; this list comes in handy at this stage and enables me to go straight to the substandard code pieces and fix them up.

Use a consistent coding style

I recently noticed that my coding style was inconsistent across my projects: variables names were either under_score or camelCase while method declarations used brace-on-new-line and brace-on-same-line approaches.

The problem with this approach is that it breaks up my flow of thought and makes speed-reading code difficult. Now, I choose a single style and stick to it throughout a project – any style is fine provided I use it consistently.

Scientific Debugging

I came across the term ‘scientific debugging’ while blog-hopping and it has stuck in my subconsciousness ever since. Identifying bugs can be a challenge: for small projects, I just try to figure out where the bug might be and then check for this. However, this approach does not scale, I wouldn’t randomly guess on a 5000 line project.

Scientific debugging is a systematic process: you make hypotheses about the likely causes of the bug, make a list of places to check and then go through this systematically while eliminating entries. You’ll most probably find the bug with less effort and without running through the entire list.

Project Management

I rarely used to track how much time and effort I put into my projects; I would just code and code and code. Now I know better, I estimate how many hours I can put in before, during and after each project. I try to use Agile (although, I use a simple list + pomodoro too) for project planning, task management and effort estimation. It is now trivial looking up my project status: implemented features, issues list and proposed features.

Testing

I tried my hands at TDD last year and I felt it was just a way of doing too much work for coding. While I might be wrong about TDD, I think it’s essential to have a solid testing process in whatever project you’re doing.

Test, test and test: run the gamut (if possible): unit, integration, functional, stress, regression etc.

Enough said… I have dirty code to polish. If you did find some of the points useful, please share your thoughts and ideas.

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