At some point or another, many developers will need to confront legacy code. The difficulty of this task can vary drastically, depending on several factors. If the codebase is relatively small and developers who have actively worked on it are available, it might not be that painful to figure out what is going on. However, […]

If your team hasn’t yet reached the utopia of a fully automated deployment pipeline, you likely have a series of steps or scripts that you perform for every deployment. Perhaps this process is documented somewhere, or maybe (more likely) it’s just passed down from developer to developer through tribal knowledge.

Unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, exploratory testing—all are important methods that contribute to delivering quality software. But there’s another important kind of testing that is often overlooked, and that’s testing the production environment. For example, has the production environment been configured correctly so the system can successfully send email? Can the system access a […]

Most software projects have an established visual design: colors, layout, typography, etc. It’s typically one of the first things to be set up. But the product is going to change and evolve. Maybe a new button needs to be added. Or a link, or a metric, or some other widget. While a designer often leads […]

Out of all the tests I write on a day-to-day basis, acceptance tests are the hardest. In my experience, writing them for web applications is complex. There are many asynchronous actions going on: web requests firing off, responses being processed, UI elements popping on and off the screen, etc. To manage this complexity, I’ve been […]

As we decide where to focus, figure out the best way to implement things, or evaluate costs on any project, we hear the same questions: “How much will this cost?” Or “When will it be done?” Or even technical questions like, “How many records can this process per second?” We need to make decisions and […]