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Report on zero-defect code

The US National Security Agency has released a case study showing how to develop zero-defect code in a cost-effective manner. Diomidis D. Spinellis has taken a closer look at the claims and the code released for this project. At first when I read through the article I agree with most his points, but it gets quite interesting when I read the comments.

The things we consider important when living in our business-entrepriecey-systems-world might not be feasible when you’re doing realtime-secure-flightsystems etc. If you are working under the paradigm of formal verification, loops might be a bad thing.

I don’t know much about this stuff, and I am quite content not needing to think about it. That said I really try to strive for zero-defect, maintainable code, it just doesn’t seem worth it doing formal verification on most systems I work on. I should look into it though to learn a little about it without picking it up. I think working in this fashion will probably block all attempts to be agile.

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Development

The best regular expresion plugin for Eclipse

I’ve looked into some of the regexp plug-ins for Eclipse today, and QuickREx is, in my opinion, the best one out there.

If you have other favourites, please inform me:-)

The contributors to this project has also implemented a plug-in for developing XPath expressions.

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Development

JavaZone 2008 is over

So JavaZone 2008 is over. Had a blast, and saw lots of cool stuff. It was a bit crowded some times, and a bit too many talks was full, but all in all good. Just a short summary for on the good stuff:

  • Heidi Arnesen Austlid on Open Source in the public sector – The government in Norway has a strong preference for Open Source. The motivation for this is to reduce costs, enable exchange of information through open standards and take back control of their it-systems.
  • Rickard Öberg on Qi4J – A good introduction to the component oriented stuff Qi4J is built upon. Everything i compiled by the Java compiler, and everything is refactorable. Really nice stuff, that will be extremely interesting once it matures.
  • Mary Poppendieck on the Double Paradox of Lean Software Development – Mary is always interesting. Utilisation is not the thing to strive for, throughput is. In fact if you maximise utilisation for the expected you have no capacity to handle the unexpected and performance will suffer severely when the unexpected occurs.
  • Robert C. Martin on functions for Clean Code – Uncle Bob is also one of those really good speakers that are always entertaining. A good talk on the basics of function design and how to make this readable and maintainable. Most of us has a lot to learn about pretty basic things, and that a lot of this basic training in good programming (often good OO) is ignored in our education.

Reviewing the program I now see that I have missed more good talks than I really wanted. A mix of bad planning, beer and walking around meeting people will have to take the blame. 😉 I hope they publish most talks as videos later on.

Great conference, see you next year. 🙂