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June 23, 2008 | Mark Sjurseth: More Delays Reported for Android…Depending How One Counts

There seems to be no hiding this story today.  The short of it…Google is experiencing some delays with its roll out of Android and the first devices that will support it. Google had stated earlier this year that the first Android phone would ship in the second half of 2008. Today’s report from the Wall Street Journal reported a slow down which quickly down spiraled to reports of delay and “A Blow to Google’s Mobile Ambitions”.  The apparent frenzy around the story appears to be short lived as more blogs are now clarifying the state of Android and restating that late Q4 still falls within the second half of 2008 where Google predicted devices would first emerge. As far as Google is concerned “We remain on schedule to deliver the first Android-based handset in the second half of 2008 and we’re very excited to see the momentum continuing to build behind the Android platform among carriers, handset manufacturers, developers and consumers.”

June 11, 2008 | Paul Bourdeaux: Amazing What a Little Unit Testing Can Do…

I recently received an email from a colleague about a particular issue they encountered, and I couldn’t help but share.  This engineer was working on the second version of a project that had been released about two years prior.  The original author of the code apparently did not subscribe to the idea of unit tests, because there was no test suite at all.  Now, two years after the initial release, my colleague is adding tests and discovering that some features simply never worked to begin with…

June 04, 2008 | Paul Bourdeaux: Help, I’m Still Using Java 1.4!

As many people know, the most current Java Release Family is Java 6.6.  It was made available to the general public back in December 2006.  Java 7 - Codename Dolphin is in beta, but the development community is expecting it to be released sometime in 2008.  With the introduction of the new, it is also time to say goodbye to the old.  The Java 1.4 family will reach its End of Service Life (EOSL) this year, in October 2008.  This means that that release family will no longer be supported by Sun, nor will they distribute the SDK or JRE anymore.  Similarly, Sun announced in April that the EOSL for Java 5.x will be in October of 2009.

What does this mean for companies still developing against Java 1.4 or Java 5.0?

May 27, 2008 | Paul Bourdeaux: Should We Test Getters and Setters?

When new engineers are being brought into the fold of unit testing, one question invariably arises: “Should we test getters and setters?”  The answer, in the humble opinion of this engineer, is yes.  This is by no means a new argument; it has been raging across the software development field for years.  Let’s face it, public getter and setter methods are (normally) inherently simple, and writing unit tests for them seem to be a waste of time – testing the language’s ability to set and pass variables instead of any actual code.  But there are a few dangers lurking in not testing them…

Whenever I advocate testing getters and setters, the first argument I almost always get is, “A simple getter and setter can’t break.”  Wrong.  They can break, and I have seen it happen.

April 18, 2008 | Paul Bourdeaux: Unmaintable Code - It doesn’t have to be this hard…

Two of my all time favorite authors, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, coined the phrase, “Code [your project] as if the next guy to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.”  I truly wish more people would take that to heart.  All too often I am working on a maintenance task, and I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what the hell the code is doing than I spend actually fixing the bug.

Take, for instance, the following real code snippet that a colleague of mine recently sent me…

January 08, 2008 | Greg Ness: Widgets, Widgets Everywhere

Widgets, those mini-software applications, that you can download and embed on web pages, are on a tear, and most of them are coming from third-party developers. Some examples are applications such as iLike, Bunchball Games and Picnik. Forbes recently highlighted the explosive growth of widgets in this recent article. To illustrate this growth, Forbes cites the story of Facebook, which opened its platform to third party developers in May of 2007 and now has nearly 13,000 widgets available that have been downloaded 765 million times.

January 04, 2008 | Greg Ness: High-Def DVD War Over? Warner Goes With Blu-ray.

I wanted to buy a high-definition DVD player this holiday season. I was getting tired of how long it was taking my cable provider and the various networks to make the switch to more HDTV programming, so I thought at least with a Blu-ray or an HD DVD player, I could get my pixels worth on our TV watching movies in an HD format.

At the store, I looked at the movies that are now available in high-def, but was disappointed to find there were many titles I wanted that were only available in one format or the other. Then I looked at the players. Yikes…I thought I heard the prices had come down, but both Blu-ray and HD DVD players were still in the $400 range. Sticker shock. Not wanting to plunk down $400 on the losing platform (not to mention the cost of the movies), I left the store disappointed without making a purchase.

October 26, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: Poor Design Can Make Good Software Bad

The worst kind of bug is one that was developed into a software application by design.  To better illustrate what I am talking about, take this example from worsethanfailure.com:

As the recent father of twin babies, Philip B. was relieved to learn that his employer’s benefit provider, Sun Life Canada, made the insurance process really simple. Adding the little ones on the plan required no more than a phone call to provide birth dates, names, and that sort of thing. All seemed so easy, until the customer service rep realized what Philip was trying to do: “I’m sorry sir, but we need a different birth date for each of your kids.”

“Uhh, er,” Philip stuttered, rather puzzled, “they’re twins? They were both born on the seventh of May, so they actually do have the same birth date.”

“Oh yes, I understand,” she said, “but our system cannot handle two people with the same last name born in the same month of the same year on the same plan.”

September 26, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: The Difference Between Reliability and Quality

They sound similar.  And they are often used (erroneously) interchangeably. Both terms, reliable and quality, can be used to describe a software application that has a low degree of error.  But there is one fundamental difference between the two. One is objective, measurable, and can be estimated, whereas the other is based on primarily subjective criteria…

August 22, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: Developmental Integrity

It is not often you have the chance to coin a phrase, especially by accident.  Yet occasionally a person is faced with a situation in which they are talking about an event or relationship that has no good descriptive name, and are forced to make up their own.  This was the case when I was trying to explain to my peers the relationship that existed between Software Reliability and Software Maintainability.  And thus Developmental Integrity was born…

March 05, 2007 | Ron Lee: HD Radios Ready For Prime Time at Wal-Mart

As reported by AP and Business Week Online , Wal-Mart will today start selling car receivers for digital radio, also known as HD Radio (which is free, and should not be confused with subscription-based satellite radio).

November 06, 2006 | Greg Ness: Video Advertising On The Web Set To Explode

Fueled by huge growth in consumer broadband connections, as well as the rise of hot new online video destinations like YouTube, a new eMarketer report projects online video advertising will grow 89 percent next year. While online video ads still represent only a small fraction of all Web marketing, this format will become a major category at these projected growth rates.