Enjoy a great article by Andriy Podlyesnyy, who doesn’t yet have his own blog. (Credit for the original physical health text goes to Angel Sharum)
How to Create Healthy Software
Creating healthy software is the most important thing software engineer can do for himself. Without health nothing else matters. Software has to be healthy for programmers to enjoy life, provide good service to the client, and do things IT professionals enjoy. Taking care of software health should be programmer’s number one priority. No matter what your age or background you can start creating healthy software. Here are some tips to help get your started.
- Maintain healthy weight. Programmer need to lose any excess code he is carrying around in the source. It is harming software body in more ways than one. Excess business logic around your User Interface harms UI organs and future redesign, extra weight puts strain on network, memory, hard drive usage and maintenance. Being overweight is the number one cause of performance issues.
- Use healthy well balanced IT best practices. If you already have a health condition you should follow whatever latest best practices the IT community had found for particular business problem. If your code is not suffering from any ailments yet, then it will be easier to do healthy coding. Focus on layer separation, Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Development, and lean objects as the staples of your software diet. Don’t go overboard on over-engineering though because the features may prove to be not used and therefore are heavier and harder to refactor. Following the agile style development is actually healthy for most IT projects. If you are trying to lose weight in the code go by cleaning an unused code as you refactor, Unit Test will help to ensure overall health of the code and bug free environment.
- Exercise TDD regularly. TDD is imperative to good software health. You can not achieve optimal health without including TDD into your plan. TDD helps your overall code quality and increase confidence during major refactoring. It also helps your code to grow bug free, and allows your boss heart to stay healthy. Form a regular TDD plan and stick to it. Pick Unit Tests that you actually like so you are more apt to continue doing them.
- Reduce stress. Find ways of coping with stressful events in software lifecycle. Practice story driven development or similar specification definition techniques to help relieve misunderstanding with the users and reduce number of misleading requirements and/or bugs. Use TDD to improve code quality to reduce time spent on production support. Automate routine tasks. Stress can cause minor and major problems ranging from irritated user phone call to job loss. Learn to relieve stress to live longer.
- Get adequate learning. Knowledge is very important to your software health. Reading enough of IT blogs and latest industry best practices will give you more energy, keep you and your code healthy, and just make you feel better all around. When mind is deprived of knowledge serious health problems can occur in your code.
Keeping your code healthy isn’t hard. It does require dedication and commitment. Take your code health seriously and do what it takes to reach optimal results. Once you get in a healthy routine you will feel so much better, you’ll wonder how you survived the other way. Coding a healthy software leads to a happy life. Don’t let anything stand in your way.
