A single poorly-made decision can have profound ripple-effects. Once your stuck with it, you make accommodations, hacks and work-arounds. Eventually, things work, but the result is less than ideal.

Changing tack requires sometimes pervasive rework to the application. How can we reduce the risks and improve the value created?

After reverse engineering procedural code in C, VB or even Python, I'm finding that procedural programming inevitably leads to bad, bad code-rot.

Consider some of the common design patterns.

Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either

• If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
• Block comments …

Another case study on TDRE.

Provided: 2,938 lines of Python code which process a handful of large files to create a number of outputs. [Details can't be disclosed.]

Objective: Refactor to distinguish between the overall sequence of transformational steps and the details of each individual step.

This is a fair-to-partly silly question that shows up on places like StackOverflow once in a while.

Python is used widely and pretty heavily.

It's a built-in feature to many operating systems in common use. The exception, of course, is Windows.

I just found out -- the hard way -- that Python …

In "Unit Test Case, Subject Matter Experts and Requirements" I suggested that it's often pretty easy to get a spreadsheet of full-worked out examples from subject-matter experts. Indeed, if your following TDD, that spreadsheet of examples is solid gold.

Let's consider something relatively simple. Let's say we're working on some …

Here's a typical "I don't like TDD" question: the topic is "Does TDD really work for complex projects?"

Part of the question focused on the difficulty of preparing test cases that cover the requirements. In particular, there was some hand-wringing over conflicting and contradictory requirements.

Here's what's worked for me …

Looked interesting enough for someone to email it to me. Still can't figure out why they sent it. Posting this feels like advertising, so perhaps I should charge them a promotional fee.

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …

I'm looking for a unbiased Python expert to help with a book I'm working on. We need "an unbiased python expert with a keen eye for detail."

The role is technical reviewer. I've never done this before, but it appears that the tech reviewer is a paid position somewhere in …

Many folks use Python's unittest module for integration testing. It sometimes leads to whining and hand-wringing, but it is very effective. Ordinary "unit" tests use mocks and focus on a class or a module more-or-less in isolation. The purists say "complete isolation". But that's sometimes unrealistic. A class that's part …