Tuesday, August 09, 2005

my first blog

well, this is my very first blog. i will see how well it goes.

i chose the title efficiency because i think there is a lot of room to improve any process that we have to go through every day, be it work, life, or whatever. it's felt even more strongly in the IT industry (where i am in). the purpose of IT is to improve and automate processes. however, surprisingly enough, most of IT internal processes are not efficient at all.

for example, we have been preaching for refactoring code as much as possible. this is one of the most fundamental principles and you can trace fancy ideas such as model driven architecture to it. however, within a medium/large sized project, it's next to impossible for any one (say an architect) to review thousands of lines of new code every day and find out if common pitfalls such as copy-paste is used. in comes the utility cpd to rescure, the detection process is automated, and efficiency is achieved.

there are many such code analyzers. you can also resort to code coverage tools to have a high level view of how much code coverage you have (great for project managers and powerpoints). if you use maven to build your project, you can get many of the reports for free by using the appropriate plugins.

the important point is that we can use software to improve the software engineering process.