MarkHenke Archives - Software Quality Blog

Team Room Problems: 5 Signs of a Toxic Code Review Culture

March 19, 2019Mark Henke6

Code Review biohazard Many people have explored the concept of code reviews at length. They continue to be an integral part of the developer experience, for reasons I will discuss below. But, like most things that challenge us to improve, they can easily become awkward and a host for a variety of toxic behaviors. A number of articles have been written about proper code reviews, and they usually center around the idea of “being nice.” But I’m going to hone in on a few slightly different signs of toxicity in your code reviews. And with each sign, I’ll help you understand how you can change your team’s behavior to create a healthier environment.

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Automated Code Reviews: 5 Manual Checks You Can Automate

December 4, 2018Mark HenkeNo Comments

I am curious about how infrequent automated code reviews seem to be in the workplace. As software?developers, we pride ourselves on our ability to automate?away other people’s problems. Much of what we do is scrutinizing manual work done?by our customers?or business?stakeholders. We find tasks that could be performed more efficiently, automate them, and the customer hopefully praises our efforts.

Yet it seems?that we rarely scrutinize our own work. Manual code reviews run rampant on many software teams. We take our “expert opinion” and turn it into either a mental or written checklist. Then we apply the checklist through manual labor, looking over one file at a time. Oftentimes we miss things; perhaps we’re tired or distracted by other tasks.

Why not do to our own processes what we do to others: automate them? After all, computers will be better at handling some of these checklist items than we are.

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How Much Time Do Programmers Spend Debugging? Too Much

November 27, 2018Mark Henke1

We’ve all been in that situation where you’re streaming along, banging out some sick code for a new feature. You’re excited to see how many minds you’ll blow when you demo it. And then you see a blip on your radar. Something is going wrong with your production system. Oh no. You give it a cursory look and you realize you don’t understand what’s going on. At this point, you know your day is shot. Why? Because you already know you’ll need to spend too much time debugging.

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C# Struct: Definition, Examples, Best Practices, and Pitfalls

November 20, 2018Mark HenkeNo Comments

Ahh, C# structs: a classic carryover from the C/C++ days. Have you ever used one? Wondering how they work? Well, they are similar to classes with some substantial differences. Structs have niche value to us as C# developers. You don’t often need them, but there are some things they do better than classes.

They also come with some caveats. Let me walk you through all this through a series of code examples.

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4 Reasons Why We Need Code Comments

November 13, 2018Mark HenkeNo Comments

Why do we need code comments? I would not be surprised if your first answer is, “We don’t.”

I get it. Senior developer after senior developer has taught us that “comments are bad.” And we cheerfully nod our heads, saying, “I am smarter for not using them.” We grin smugly when we see one of our juniors make the “mistake” of using comments in their code.

But as much as we sometimes abuse them, we still need comments.

I know comments don’t affect the code’s behavior. I understand how they can get stale and stop making sense. I am all for writing clean code, and I do my best to ensure my variables, methods, and class names describe their intent as accurately as possible. If I see dead code lying around in the comments for a while, I delete it.

But here is the bottom line: we need code comments because there are some things they do better than plain code. Here’s why.

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The Case for Web Forms, Even in 2018

October 30, 2018Mark Henke20

It seems easy for people to say things like “LOL, Web Forms” or “Web Forms is dead.”?Web Forms sometimes?gets very little respect from the .NET development community. We look forward in time, forgetting the giants on whose shoulders we stand. It was the?dominant way of making websites in .NET for many years. Is it really a remnant of a bygone era? Or does it have a vibrant existence in places oft overlooked?

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Web.config: What It Is and 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid

October 23, 2018Mark Henke2

We as software developers have created several disciplines for coding: test-driven developments, clean code principles, and screaming architecture, to name a few.?However, we often find our web.config files can sprawl out of control.

We just don’t pay as much attention to our configuration as we do to our?classes and methods. The good news is that many mistakes are easily avoided, and with a little discipline we can put our configs on par with the rest of our codebase.

In this post, I’ll show you how. We’ll look at five of the most common configuration mistakes and how to avoid them.

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