It's that time of the year again! I have now been working as a software developer for the past 7 years. I don't know why that means something to me, but it does. Last year, i gave an overview of my short career which people seemed to find interesting, so i figured i might as well add this to my list of 'blogging traditions'.
So what have i done in the past year? Well, as i mentioned in last year's post, i finally started working at my company's home office instead of working at client locations, and it has definitely been the best year of my career so far.
When i made the switch, i thought that we (as a development company) were already pretty good, but i had some very clear changes/improvements in mind that i wanted us to achieve in the first year. More specifically, i wanted to see big improvements in the following areas:
- Increase the efficiency of our automated testing practices.
- Get people to write loosely coupled code.
- Increase overall performance and scalability of the code we write.
- Get people to truly care about code quality and proper software development practices
My coworkers started writing automated tests way before i did. But before i came aboard, none of our automated tests would ever substitute the implementation of a component during tests. No mocks, no stubs, just the real thing all the time. If we had tests for code that was somewhat dependent on data access components, then those tests would effectively be dependent on a real database. If we had tests for code that was somewhat dependent on processing files, then those tests would effectively be dependent on real files.
We had thousands and thousands of tests which took a long time to run, were rather fragile, and required a lot of maintenance effort to keep them running at all times. These days, our tests only use the database when we are testing our queries and our NHibernate mappings. We use mocks to substitute the data layer when we are testing our business code, and we also moved to using MVP patterns in the UI layer so we could start writing automated tests for a lot of our UI code as well. Obviously, all of that required us to write our code in loosely coupled manner, which we now all do with Dependency Injection and using an Inversion Of Control container. So i am pretty happy with the results of the first two goals.
The third goal (performance and scalability) is also coming along nicely. The architecture that we use (and if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll probably have a pretty good view on what our architecture typically looks like), in combination with the libraries that we use, gives us plenty of possibilities to write scalable and performant code. One of our clients made us perform extensive stress testing for one of the projects we did for them, and the results were good. I'm pretty confident that our usage of the Request/Response WCF Service Layer plays a very large part in getting those results. Of course, we still have performance problems every now and then, but we now do a pretty good job of proactively keeping an eye on it (in most cases), and when performance problems do show up, we can usually fix them pretty easily.
So far so good, right? Then comes the final goal... getting people to truly care about code quality and proper software development practices. I am very happy with the progress that some people have made, but i am pretty disappointed that i can count them on one hand. Some people improved tremendously in the past year, while some only seem to care when they know their code is going to be reviewed. I was very disappointed when i noticed that some people didn't mind resorting to technical shortcuts or not properly testing things when nobody was watching them. As a result, i'm now actually monitoring the commits for most of the projects that we have going and whenever i see something that doesn't look right, i talk to the author of the particular piece of code about it.
I really don't like the fact that i feel the necessity of doing that, but i'm gonna try this approach for a month or two to see if things improve. I hope to see more people actively reviewing other people's changes in the upcoming months because this is a task that should always be shared instead of having only one person who does this. I hope that in a year, we'll have enough peer-pressure to make sure everyone keeps playing it straight. Anyways, i'll let you guys know about it next year 
So all in all, it's been a very interesting year. I've worked on some cool things, i get enough variety in my work, i get to see (some) people grow continuously in their capabilities, and the amount of time i had to spend on doing things i'd rather not do was very low. Much lower than i can imagine in any other company anyways. Oh, and according to some of my coworkers i'm also responsible (to some extent) for an increase in our after-hours-beer-consumption as well as pizza deliveries. It has been a good year indeed 