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Software Quality

Articles, podcasts, talks, and more about Software Quality.
Blog Post

Why 75 Dollars in Tokens Can Create So Much Value

75 dollars in token costs sometimes buy a week of work or more. What that means economically, and why companies often draw the wrong conclusion from it.

Blog Post

The New Economics of Software Development

AI has dramatically reduced the time it takes to build software, but that doesn’t mean we should simply deliver more features. The productivity gains from coding agents give us an opportunity to rethink how we invest our development time. Instead of accelerating technical debt, we can use AI to build cleaner abstractions, improve maintainability, and leave our codebases better than we found them. This article explores how AI has changed the classic project management triangle, and why quality should become our new competitive advantage.

Blog Post

Using the space, not optimizing the treadmill

Why agentic development needs product discovery

Blog Post

Understanding AI Coding Patterns Through Cognitive Load Theory

AI coding assistants either severely harm learning or enhance it beyond manual coding—depending entirely on interaction patterns. A recent study reveals six distinct patterns with dramatically different outcomes. We’ll examine why through cognitive psychology and explore the study’s limitations.

Blog Post

AI and Elaboration: Which Coding Patterns Build Understanding?

AI tools let you complete coding tasks without connecting new information to your existing mental models—a cognitive process known as elaboration that is crucial for building understanding. But some AI interaction patterns preserve this elaboration while others bypass it entirely. Let’s explore what elaboration is, why it helps with learning, and how we can use AI tools in a way that helps with this process rather than circumventing it.

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Speed vs. Skill

Developing with AI through the cognitive Lens

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Context Engineering: Managing AI-Generated Code Complexity

AI tools make developers more productive at writing code, but can overwhelm code reviewers with massive changes. Learn practical strategies for managing context in AI-assisted development to keep your code comprehensible, your reviews manageable, and your team’s productivity genuinely improved. Small scope was always good practice—with AI, it’s essential.

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Git Clarity: Building Meaningful Commits and Linear History

Feeling overwhelmed by Git’s complexity? Discover a streamlined workflow that centers on creating single, comprehensible commits. Learn how this approach leads to clearer code reviews, fewer merge conflicts, and a beautiful linear commit history that tells the story of your code. This isn’t just about Git commands—it’s about aligning your tools with how your brain works.

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A Governance Framework for Digital Sovereignty
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Technical and other Debt in IT Systems

This article explores the many hidden forms of technical debt that silently slow down IT teams—far beyond just messy code.

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Internal Development Platforms

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) help us accelerate software development. They represent the natural evolution of developments over the past decades. We’d like to show why this is the case with a historical overview and then examine current challenges.

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Rules, Tools, and Teamwork

Getting Static Code Analysis Right

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Rate Limiting with Spring Boot, Bucket4j, and Redis

Let’s implement rate-limiting protection for multiple Spring Boot server instances using bucket4j and redis to have the solution on application level.

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Rate Limiting with Spring Boot

Let’s implement rate-limiting protection for your Spring Boot server without the need for any additional dependencies beyond those included in the Spring Boot Starter package.

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Testing your GitLab CI/CD pipeline

Blog Post

Shortcomings of ISO 25010

Published in 2011, the ISO 25010 standard on software product quality lacks pragmatism and practical applicability. Terms like scalability, deployability, energy efficiency, safety, or code quality are missing. This article explains these shortcomings and shows that even the (draft) update from 2022 still needs polishing…

Blog Post

Software quality in the context of value chains and evolution

Quality goals help to make more informed architectural decisions. However, identifying a set of the most needed qualities is a challenging task. Quality requirements are strongly dependent on the perspective of individuals. The importance of certain qualities also changes over time. In this blog post, I introduce an idea that helps to understand qualities in terms of their relevance (and non-relevance). We discover how qualities interplay with value creation activities and evolution by using the ISO 25010 quality model together with Wardley Maps as a foundation.

Blog Post

Quality Driven Software Architecture - Revised

Getting your product quality right

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Test organization and naming

As our system grows, so will our test suites. For our production code, we have learned techniques to keep it maintainable. For example, we try to structure our logic into sub-aspects, put them in specific locations and give the units meaningful names. We want to achieve the same for our tests. One of the main goals is that a developer - or generally speaking, the person who has to maintain the test - knows where to find which test. We also want to understand as quickly as possible what the test is for and what might be the reason for a failing test.

Blog Post

Test Strategy

In our previous posts, we focused on why and how we write tests. In most of our projects, there will be many of those tests. In the last post about tests granularity, we additionally stated that there usually will be different kinds of tests, on different levels of granularity. That leads to our next topic: which kinds of tests do we need and what is the ideal mix of them?

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What’s in a Name: Quality
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Tests Granularity

In two previous posts we discussed the benefits of automated tests and the properties of a good test. So far we were trying to avoid differentiating the tests in any way. This time we want to address one way how tests can be classified: tests granularity.

Blog Post

Anatomy of a Good Test

In our last post, we focused on why we should write tests and what value they provide. This time we will go far more technical and take a look at a single test. We will show what makes a test a good one and describe desired and unwanted properties. Interestingly enough, all those properties hold, no matter how isolated or integrated the test is. This already gives us a hint that all tests are alike, we should remember that. Unfortunately, as the topic is very broad, we will have to skip some aspects that play a role when we’re talking about test suites. We will get back to them in one of our next posts.

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Why you should write automated tests
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Visualizing the progress of a refactoring into a hexagonal architecture using jQAssistant

In my last project, we decided to refactor the inner structure of one of our services into a Hexagonal Architecture. It was clear that this was no task that could be done within a couple of days. During this long-running refactoring, we wanted to make our progress visible. Where are we now? What did we already have achieved? What do we still have to do? In this blog post, I describe the approach we took and how it helped us with our task.

Case Study

HILFE FĂśR JUNGS (“Help for Boys”): Reliable software for mobile consultations

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