Software development | Page 7 of 8

Posts Categorized in Software development

At Redgate, we’re fascinated by software development and how to do it smarter, better and more intelligently. How do we reduce the burden of legacy code and technical debt, for example? How do we use test-driven development to make the code as robust as possible. How do we apply UX principles and skills to make the complicated software we develop intuitive to use?

Top 3 tips for software testing a mature product

Developers and testers generally don’t like to work on a mature product with a legacy code base, especially when the majority of the team has no previous knowledge of either. Having said that, while building and testing a mature product can prove a lot more challenging than tackling a greenfield one, my recent experiences suggest there... Read more

What’s in a (strong) name?

Package managers are brilliant. The obvious win is the convenience of versioning your dependencies without having to commit binaries to Git. Lots of people use package managers for third party dependencies, but I’m going to talk about using them for components within an organisation. This is where package managers fulfil their true potential – making... Read more

JavaScript unit tests

The amount of JavaScript code being used at Redgate is increasing quite rapidly. We are writing more web based products and also opting to use web technologies like CEF for our desktop products, so it is inevitable that a lot of our code is going to be written in JavaScript, like it or not.... Read more

The unexpected consequences of compiling user feedback at collection

I’ve run plenty of face-to-face usability sessions, but since joining Redgate I’ve found myself having to run remote sessions. I’ve discovered a great technique and in doing so I have also stumbled upon some unexpected consequences of using it. Redgate has a vast user base, and it turns out that a significant portion of... Read more

Visualizing team work: physical taskboards vs virtual taskboards

I’m a project manager, so unsurprisingly I can find myself in animated conversations with other project managers regarding how best to manage the work that our team members are doing. We all have our favourite techniques and methods, but the process generally starts with making the work each member of the team is planning... Read more

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

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

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

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

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