Software Crafts Podcast

This week we have Patrick Smacchia, the creator of NDepend. We will discuss software maintainability, and for that, Patrick will share his opinion on the heuristic "No broken windows" from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/no-broken-windows/). Patrick's shares his experiences, from the early stages of his career to today. We share his principles and practices regarding software maintainability and how it is encoded in NDepend. We also have a glimpse over his views on testing!

Patrick recommends the following resources:

• NDepend Blog - https://blog.ndepend.com/
• Design by Contract, from Bertrand Meyer - https://bertrandmeyer.com/category/design-by-contract/
• Scott Hanselman - https://www.hanselman.com/
• 3Blue1Brown on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw 

Patrick has been fortunate to start programming as a child on 8bits computers in the 80s. Then he naturally graduated in Math and Software engineering. After a decade of C++ programming and consultancy, Patrick got interested in the brand new .NET platform in 2002. He wrote the best-seller book (in French) on .NET and C#, published by O'Reilly and also did manage some academic and professional courses on the .NET platform and C#.

Over the years, Patrick gained a passion for understanding the structure and evolution of large complex real-world applications and good practices to improve software maintainability. As a consequence, he got interested in static code analysis and started the project NDepend.

The guest for episode number two of Software Crafts Podcast is Evelyn van Kelle. She shared her opinion on the heuristic “If something is too complex to understand, it must be wrong” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/poutsma-principle/). We navigate the waves of complexity within organisations and software, from the theory to real-life examples. She leaves her advice regarding the social practices within the complex socio-technical systems that we operate. Looking to the future, she hopes that we can reduce accidental complexity, creating more empathy organisations.

Evelyn shared the theory of:

• Valentino Braitenberg with his book “Vehicles”, where “downhill invention, uphill analysis” is the main takeaway 
• David Woods with “every sufficiently complex system, everyone’s mental model is incomplete and out of date, in different ways”

Also, she recommends the following books:

• “Thinking, fast and slow” from Daniel Kahneman
• “Dynamic Reteaming” from Heidi Helfand

Evelyn van Kelle (@EvekynvanKelle) is a social scientist at heart. She is a firm believer that accidental complexity within organisations is because we are not investing enough in the social part of the socio-technical systems. She specialised in helping companies to tackle the socio-technical complexity, namely in the IT industry.

For the first episode of Software Crafts Podcast, we have Rebecca Wirfs-Brock! We discuss the heuristic “Improve practices, don’t just follow the recipe” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/context-over-habit/), where we go over the craft of cooking and the parallel to the software industry. She illustrates to us the importance of experimentation and feedback cycles, and when we need to opt-in for longer ones. We finish with a glimpse over testing practices. All of that while uncovering Rebecca’s values, principles and practices.

Rebecca shared two resources with us:

• http://wirfs-brock.com/blog/2019/04/19/nothing-ever-goes-exactly-by-the-book/
• https://smartbear.com/blog/

Rebecca (@rebeccawb) is the founder of Wirfs-Brock Associates, invented the popular development approach called Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD) and inadvertently started the xDD meme (TDD, BDD, DDD, etc.). She is an author, speaker and trainer, focus on agility within the software domain. She is the chair of the Experience Report Initiative of Agile Alliance and was involved in the creation of the Agile movement.