Redgate Blog

5 September 2014

The (r)evolution starts here

Sssshhh. There’s a revolution going on. Quietly, purposefully, and without fanfare, Database Lifecycle Management is looming on the horizon for every developer and DBA. A continuous, agile-based approach to integrating, coordinating and managing the different phases of database delivery. Whoah, there. Database Lifecycle Management? Application Lifecycle Management, yes, but how on earth can you... Read more

27 August 2014

27 August 2014

Providing help documentation for PowerShell cmdlets

We’ve been working on a new product that involves writing Windows PowerShell cmdlets (pronounced “commandlets”) for our customers to use and, to make their lives easy, we want to provide rich built-in help documentation. There’s no easy way to do this out of the box, so I’ve written a tool that allows us to... Read more

13 August 2014

13 August 2014

UX katas – heuristic evaluation

The “extended” UX team sharpening their swords… At Redgate, our software engineers run regular “code katas”, workshops where developers practise their coding skills on simple problems, then discuss the experience afterwards as a learning exercise. So, a while ago, I thought it might be a good idea to use the same Kata principle on... Read more

21 July 2014

21 July 2014

Five steps to an effective sprint retrospective

In a typical agile software development process, sprint retrospectives are meetings run at the end a development iteration. In those sessions the team looks back on what they have done and how they have done it, and decides what they can do to improve. More succinctly, the team inspect and adapt. In my experience,... Read more

agile software development

retrospectives

Geoff Bones

18 July 2014

Geoff Bones

18 July 2014

Code kata 7: Producer-consumer problem

First, apologies for nodding off and not posting for the last few weeks. I have the usual set of excuses, which you can guess easily enough without the need to read them here. So, on to the kata: something a bit different, this time. It’s a repeat of a kata we had a go... Read more

Code Katas

Emma Armstrong

27 May 2014

Emma Armstrong

27 May 2014

Take security in your STRIDE

When you phone up for house insurance, the insurance company asks you; ”Do you have a five lever mortice deadlock? Does it comply to BS3621? Do you have a burglar alarm and so on? These are all very standard questions for this situation, and we need to make sure we are asking similar questions... Read more

Learn on the Loo

Geoff Bones

24 April 2014

Geoff Bones

24 April 2014

Code kata 6: The classic bowling game scorer, open and closed

The kata Following on from last time, this is based on Uncle Bob’s now-famous bowling game kata, with the added spice of adhering to the open-closed principle of SOLID. The kata is well-documented online, but briefly, the idea is to write a program that takes in a series of scores for each ball a... Read more

10 April 2014

10 April 2014

Code kata 5: SOLID chess

The kata Let’s get this clear: we’re not going to write a chess-playing AI in this kata. The idea is a bit more humble: to write a program that can work out valid moves for a set of chess pieces. The purpose of this kata is to practise writing SOLID code. Use TDD, but... Read more

19 March 2014

19 March 2014

Code kata 4: Word ladder

Naming things can be very hard, yet a well-chosen name can really help a reader understand how your code works. This code kata is an old favorite, one that we’ve done before, but this time we’ve added an emphasis on naming things well. The kata A word ladder is a sequence of words (each... Read more

Code Katas

Geoff Bones

24 February 2014

Geoff Bones

24 February 2014

Code kata 3: Refactoring

The kata This kata was inspired by a truly ugly piece of code we came across in Redgate Towers. It had a whole bouquet of code smells: long methods, a lot of indentation, static variables, inconsistent naming, code that was duplicated with small modifications, and a couple of small bugs. And, gloriously, it was... Read more

Code Katas

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Redgate Blog

The (r)evolution starts here

Providing help documentation for PowerShell cmdlets

UX katas – heuristic evaluation

Five steps to an effective sprint retrospective

Code kata 7: Producer-consumer problem

Take security in your STRIDE

Code kata 6: The classic bowling game scorer, open and closed

Code kata 5: SOLID chess

Code kata 4: Word ladder

Code kata 3: Refactoring