Infoworld: 10 practices of highly ineffective software developers

Some are bad habits to overcome; some are poor decisions forced by managers who don't know what they're doing. Read 'em ... and weep

Writing great software is not that hard. But software developers can be their own worst enemy in trying to code the good stuff because they lapse into sloppy or wrongheaded practices.

Actually, scratch that: The developer's worst enemy is really the eager technical manager who tries to deliver a project faster than possible and pushes developers to engage into ill-advised practices. In high-end enterprise and Web-scale projects in particular, that can result in wholesale disaster.

These pitfalls are well known. Few developers would argue with them -- or at least with most of them. Those who dare to disagree may do so in the comments section at the end of this article.

1. Go even a day without writing a unit test
Developers love to get mired in details like the difference between a unit test and a functional test. The answer: Who cares? What matters is that you have good coverage and can tell when something breaks. It matters that you have a good starting point to run code and set a breakpoint in the debugger. The only way this can work is "as you go."

...continued...

Read the rest of my article over at InfoWorld.

Also, I am speaking at the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) tonight at the NC State University Club in Raleigh, NC.. The topics will include Trends in Mobility and Cloud Computing. If you are interested in attending or joining AITP, please click on the above link.

After you're done. Please consider sending me ideas on other topics you'd like me to write about. I'm always looking for ideas.

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