Software craftsmanship

Todays blogs entry is about a podcast about an interview with Bob Martin about Software Craftmanship and all its importance while developing software. It was a very difficult podcast to listen completely however it is great.

As we have stated before, agile processes are really important nowadays, this is because, the task of developing software gets reduced in time by a lot, basically you will different reasons here. One of the main reasons its because when you are using agile processes you do not have to write as many diagrams as in an UML, however do not be mistaken that you do not need to draw any diagram at all, you will just draw what it is actually needed in the project. However as we discussed before in a previous entry, developing UML's is not bad either, because UML will give us an approach to communicate the software development team about the changes and subjects that the project will have. Bob Martin says that while developing software, you must ensure to be working with a pair, this way exchanging different ideas to develop the code will give you a lot of feedback about what is wrong and what is correct to do.

As most agile processes state, it is really important to get involved with the customer. It must be an entity in the development process, thus, communicating with the customer will provide us with the feedback we need to continue with the development.

There are different tools that we must gather or use in order to be a software craftsman. The first one is the IDE, it is the most essential part of the programmer, without it we cannot write code, debug, build dependencies, etc. It is fundamental to learn how they work and how will they aid us while debugging or developing any program. The second one is to have a code repository such as Github which is actually my favorite, having the ability to change things to a previous commit it is an important tool that we must have in our toolkit, also providing us with the ease to communicate with other people and transfer our code. And last of it, its about programming languages, it is really recommended that even if we are working in an enterprise we should continue learning a lot of languages, new patterns, etc.