Happy Are The Software Engineers.. (article)

My first ever published article is called "Happy Are The Software Engineers.." and it appeared in Better Software magazine in December 2006. The article describes briefly how complete concentration can create the feeling of happiness especially if the task at hand is meaningful. I wanted to highlight that working for software quality is meaningful and with Tick-the-Code you can achieve complete concentration.

Simply put, happiness is Tick-the-Code.

Tick-the-Code Inspection: Theory and Practice (paper)

My first ever scientific paper is called "Tick-the-Code Inspection: Theory and Practice" and it appeared in the peer-reviewed publication of ASQ (American Society for Quality) called Software Quality Professional.

As the name says, the paper reveals all details of Tick-the-Code up to the 24 coding rules. At the moment this paper is the most comprehensive written source for information about Tick-the-Code.

Tick-the-Code Inspection: Empirical Evidence (on Effectiveness) (paper)

My second paper is called Tick-the-Code Inspection: Empirical Evidence (on Effectiveness). It was prepared for, and first presented at, Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2007. The paper presents measurements taken in Tick-the-Code training courses so far (about 50 sessions with over 300 software professionals). The results are revealing. The main point of the paper is that software engineers could keep their software much simpler and avoid making many of the errors software projects are so notorious for.

In the Appendix of the paper, you'll find all the active rules of Tick-the-Code at the time of writing (summer 2007).

Tick-the-Code - traditionally novel technique in the fight against bugs (article)

Pirkanmaan Tietojenkäsittely-yhdistys (Pitky ry) published my article in their member magazine Pitkyn Piiri 1/2008. It is called "Tick-the-Code - uusvanha tekniikka taistelussa bugeja vastaan" and it is only available in Finnish.

Future Work

Tick-the-Code Inspection: The Book (book, working title)

Since 2006, I'm writing a book on Tick-the-Code to be the most comprehensive written source. I've written first drafts of all chapters, except one. I have received some review comments and acted on them. I have contacted a few publishers and received more comments (no approval yet). O'Reilly editor Andy Oram even mentions us in the Beautiful Code blog. Next, we'll need to get people excited about the concept and the book and then approach the publishers again.

Excerpt from the book

The excerpt changes weekly. Each excerpt is still a draft version and might change before ending in the book.

Unprepared checker

Too lax code inspection processes allow you to show up in the feedback meeting unprepared. You've failed to find time to check at all. You don't have any findings to report, but show up anyway.

You typically choose one of the following courses of action. Once you notice how seriously the others are taking the findings and how important it would be for your image to have a few findings of your own, you start frantically checking. Another possible course of action is to loudly agree with other checkers. A comment like "I found that, too!" is typical. You might also mistake your comments on the importance of others' findings to be of value. You might back them "Oh, that's a nasty one!" or attack them with "That's not a real defect!".

Your contribution as an unprepared checker is close to zero (or even negative) and just by participating you make the code inspection more expensive (you could be 'contributing' somewhere else) and therefore less feasible. Unprepared checkers are an obvious sign of laxness in the code inspection process. Alternatively, if all checkers have to attend regardless of whether they've checked or not, the lowered productivity indicates too strict a process.

If the inspection process has a meeting, people should arrive prepared. There must be ways of showing that preparation is the most important phase of inspection. One way is to postpone the meeting until everybody has had enough time to prepare. These kinds of conflicts are reasons why Tick-the-Code inspections have no meetings at all. Chapter 2. "Symptoms" lists other possible problems with more complex inspection processes. Simplicity rules.

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