Hi. Today I would like to tell something about the role of complexity in software development. In software engineering, complexity is often seen as ‘the enemy’. It makes things difficult and costly. Many times, complexity is interpreted as something that is agreed on to ‘avoid’ or ‘get rid of’. Complexity…

Let’s be frank about it: doing software development the right way, is all but easy. There are many dimensions involved: functionality & scope, people & team, process & workflow, technical quality, …and probably more, depending on your business domain. What it means for software development to be ‘right’ is like…

It’s been a few years since we’ve had to make a decision on the Big Bang vs. Iterative dilemma for our project. When Erik van der Wenden and I presented our case “Incrementally replacing a legacy system using the Strangler pattern” at the Tweakers Developers Summit in February 2018, it…

I am a big fan of Continuous Deployment; the practice where every push of commits is automatically deployed to production. From time to time, I get the question how to get the testing procedure right in this way of working. Leveling up in integrating code changes Continuous Deployment is the highest level of maturity when it…

Technical Debt is a metaphor for a phenomenon first pointed out by Ward Cunningham. He defines it as (paraphrased) a conscious decision to implement a solution that is quicker and might make changes harder in the future as opposed to the ‘right’ solution that takes more time to implement. Technical…

The need to have a maintainable code base is something most developers know. But why is a maintainable code base important? How to get one? And more importantly, how to keep it? Software evolves You probably know that software evolves. Not like plants and animals, but in its own way. Plants and…

As a software engineer, you probably know some colleagues who tell you that code duplication is bad. Chances are that you also know some colleagues who tell you that code clones are not necessarily a bad thing. But what is the truth about code clones? Is there a truth? …