Published Tick-the-Code Material
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.
An Example Rule Introduced
There are 24 active rules in Tick-the-Code. Each one of them helps to locate either omissions, redundancies, ambiguities, inconsistencies or assumptions in the source code. Individual rule violations might seem minor, but when you let them accumulate long enough, you'll be in trouble.
Marked rule violations are called ticks. Try the following rule on your production-level code and see how many ticks you can find. Then analyze each tick and see if you can't improve the maintainability of your code.
The rule sample changes weekly, so in a mere 24 weeks of diligent visits, you can have yourself the complete set of Tick-the-Code rules. However, there is an easier way and you'll be rewarded with laminated rule cards to top it all up. Get trained! Contact Qualiteers if you want to know more.
DRY
"A comment must not repeat code."
Don't Repeat Yourself (or your code) in comments. It can only lead to maintenance problems.
Future Work
Tick-the-Code Inspection: The Book (book, working title)
Since 2006, there's a book on Tick-the-Code on the works. Currently the book project is on ice, as I study and gather more material and field experiences to include in the book. The book will be the most comprehensive written source on Tick-the-Code.
Excerpt from the book
The excerpt changes weekly. Each excerpt is still a draft version and might change before ending in the book.
Some checkers find defects but don't mark them because they think that "somebody else will surely find this, too." They don't recognize their unique contribution and fail to report possibly important findings. This kind of dangerous laziness occurs especially when many checkers have the same material to check possibly even with the same guidelines.
If a checker isn't sure if and what he's found, he might not mark it. The checker might think that "this isn't probably serious enough to mark." Once this happens, the code inspection breaks. The possibly high value of a code inspection starts to diminish with growing fears. The perceived seriousness of a found issue is inversely proportional to the difficulty of reporting it. This means that if the checker has the option of censoring himself, in a difficult phase of the project, when time is of essence, he will. Just when feedback on issues would be at its most valuable, some checkers will be too afraid to report everything they find.
A similar situation occurs if the checker has already found what he considers to be "enough" issues. He will deliberately overlook further items to not appear to be nitpicking and whiny. When the checkers reduce the amount of findings they report on their own, they fail to honor the Plentiful Principle:
The more findings you report, the better.
This often happens when a checker has found large amounts of relatively minor items and thinks that the author might look badly on him should he report all of them.
As a consequence the author is deprived of information. The quality assistance is below par, substandard or even poor. In a malfunctioning code inspection process, the too kind, unsure or scared checkers end up lowering the value the author would otherwise get from the process.
Chapter 2 "Symptoms" deals with general symptoms when an organization doesn't perform any code inspections. It also presents several situations where something goes wrong in code inspections.
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