Professional Software Development
Alexander Tarnowski
The Future of Software Development
February 2, 2013 – 5:07 pm
What will software development be like in the future? “Agile” as we know it, will not be around, nor will test-driven development, continuous delivery, or BDD-like methodologies. I’ve been pondering this for a while, and based on some observations and a dose of wishful thinking, I’ve arrived at the conclusion above. Do you agree?
Code archeology 101: Custom Exception Hierarchies
January 26, 2013 – 12:40 am
After having worked with various legacy codebases one discovers certain recurring traits and patterns. The topic of today is the Custom Exception Hierarchy encountered in Java legacy code. This phenomenon is rather Java-specific because of that language’s checked exceptions.
So what is a Custom Exception Hierarchy? It’s an exception hierarchy, with some strangely named exception at its root, present throughout the entire codebase and used everywhere. The author(s) of such hierarchy obviously felt that exceptions like IllegalStateException or IllegalArgumentException, or the like weren’t sufficient for the sophisticated needs of their application, so they came up with a better suited hierarchy of checked exceptions.
Country Ambassador for Agile Testing Days 2012
September 5, 2012 – 12:30 am
A while ago I was asked to become one of the Swedish country ambassadors for the Agile Testing Days 2012 conference. I said yes, because I think it’s a great conference. As country ambassador, I help in promoting the conference. I chose to do it, because I think it’s a good conference and I already recommend it to my friends.
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Min första kurs
August 31, 2012 – 9:07 am
Jag har precis lagt upp min första kurs här på Crisp – Testning av webbapplikationer med Selenium WebDriver. I detta blogginlägg tänkte jag förklara lite mer ingående vad kursen är tänkt att lära ut. Mina kolleger har också kommit med värdefull feedback och frågor som säkert kan dyka upp igen.
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Slides from the Selenium Conference
April 19, 2012 – 10:20 pm
I gave a presentation called ”Being good at waiting – Using Selenium to test Ajax-intensive pages” in an unconf session at the Selenium Conference in London.
The audience was great! Thanks everybody! I certainly didn’t know everything there’s to know about the subject, and that resulted in an interactive session where people from the audience would share their experience and answer some questions. That was so cool 
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Is your system a black box?
February 22, 2012 – 11:40 pm
Surprisingly often an organization exposes itself to a multitude of risks by not knowing enough about its systems, infrastructure, and applications. This doesn’t manifest itself as a lack of “enterprise architecture” documents (while some could help). The implications are far more down-to-earth. Does any of this sound familiar?
- Upgrading both hardware and software is unproportionally difficult and the outcome isn’t predictable
- There exist tasks that must be performed by a specific person
- There exist artifacts that everybody thinks need to be there, but no one dares to touch, delete, or upgrade
- Introduction of new employees is difficult
Properties of a good daily stand-up
October 18, 2011 – 10:14 pm by Hans Brattberg, Reza Farhang, Alexander Tarnowski, Jan Grape and Yassal Sundman
I had a conversation with some of my colleagues about what makes a good daily stand-up, here are some properties:
- Time-boxed (15 minutes)
- Everyone is engaged
- Synchronization is taking place
- Attention to problems
- People ask for help
- The conversation is about stuff that matters to most people, individual issues are postponed
- Anyone can lead the meeting, not just the Scrum Master / Team Coach
- The meeting is the starting point for the day, afterwards everyone feels energized and can start working right away
- Ends with a punch that marks the end of the meeting and the start of the day*
* The team has dumbells by the scrum board. The rule is that if you feel the current speaker is monopolizing the meeting, you can hand the speaker a dumbell. Now the speaker can keep talking only as long as they can hold up the dumbbell with an outstretched arm.
