Tag: benefits

Formal estimations fail and what works instead for me

Intro

You can find here a definition of an estimation. I’m not going over this.

By formal estimations I mean the ones widely known, documented, and discussed in software engineering, such as time and story points.

I don’t know if “formal estimations” is an accurate term. Simply “Estimations fail”  sounds too much like a clickbait title to me and I want to avoid that. This is also why the title is so long.

The problem

Why?

Why formal estimations don’t work: because of people. I am not saying the estimation methodologies themselves are totally bad. How people use them is the issue: managers just want nice numbers to report to higher managers, and engineers don’t know how to assess work.

Not to go into the old “story points do not include time, they help you find the time” topic. Story points are about… the story. Not about the person. End of… story. And not to mention that estimations are approximations, not hard limits. Continue reading Formal estimations fail and what works instead for me

Real benefits of SOLID principles

Those SOLID principles many talk about are really helpful. But why use solid principles, why is SOLID important? Because they were stated and tested by advanced programmers in real situations? I say this is an enforcement, a reason to trust them, but not the reason to jump on them. It’s actually about understanding the benefits of using them and being able to identify when you need them.

All of them help in the way of having clean code. But why would you need clean code? You can really have messy code which does the same thing as the clean one. Except when you aim for long term healthy business. Solid code makes solid business.

Each of the SOLID principles comes with its ideology, but does not guarantee a 100% benefit, because there could be other factors which more or less collide with them, the first one being when you play around the principles, but do not apply them properly.

While the benefits you get from these principles are well known, I’d like to state some of them which for me are more real, more close to the business side. Continue reading Real benefits of SOLID principles