my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

The Art of the README

Just recently I was reminded about an obvious and vital but all too often neglected aspect of good quality software: Creating and maintaining a README file to both onboard new developers and to get users started with your software easily. While certainly essential in the context of open source software maintaining a high quality README is also relevant regarding proprietary / company-internal software that's limited to only a select circle of developers and users: It enables both your customers and internal users ...

Clear Acceptance Criteria: The Key to Good Software Quality Right from the Start

Actually it should come as no surprise that clear acceptance criteria are a quintessential prerequisite for high quality software that meets both design requirements and customer demand. All too often however, acceptance criteria for software products are either non-existent or vague and ambiguous at best. Who hasn't come across 'acceptance criteria' such as "The app should have a modern UI." or "The application should be easy to use."? What do bromides like that amount to? Not much, unfortunately. Elena Kulik of RubyGarage wrote ...

Sunday April 9th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software

Keeping database schemas up-to-date with Flyway

At least ever since Ruby on Rails' Active Record Migrations put an emphasis on keeping database schemas consistent with your software's source code both during development and in production database migration tools have become a staple in modern software development. Database migration (or database refactoring as this technique is sometimes called as well) tools allow you to apply data definition language (DDL) statements like "CREATE TABLE ..." or "ALTER ..." to databases in an automated, consistent and traceable manner instead of either ...

Sunday March 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code

In an article about common software over-engineering mistakes Subhas Dandapani provides a lot of useful insights on why software often is over-engineered - sometimes to the extent it becomes unmaintainable. From my experience, the by far most frequent cause of over-engineered and overly complex software is engineers trying to anticipate requirements and potential future use cases. Everything has to be abstract in order to accommodate any possible use case business might come up with. Repetition is generally regarded as waste. Engineers hate ...

Sunday November 6th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

Mockito 2 now available

Last week version 2.1.0 of the Mockito testing framework for Java has been released. For more information on this latest iteration check out this page. As the name suggests, Mockito allows you to mock object behaviour during unit tests. When writing unit tests you only want to test a particular unit's behaviour (hence the name). Depending on the programming language used such a unit might be a function, a procedure or - most commonly in today's object-oriented programming environments - a ...

Sunday October 16th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ...

Sunday October 2nd, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Code means communication

Writing software is all about communication. Code is a way of conveying the meaning of natural language requirements in an exact manner so that computers can make sense of the intentions of our fickle human minds and the often ambiguous ways we tend to express ourselves in. So, in that respect software development amounts to translating human concepts and notions into a language machines can understand. However, communicating with machines is only one, more technical aspect, of writing software. The by far more important ...

Sunday August 21st, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

Libraries.io and Dependency CI: Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Recently, I came across Libraries.io and its companion service Dependency CI. Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Sunday August 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.