Last week, Cauê and I were refactoring some classes in our systems and faced an interesting situation.
In our application we have a notifications system. It is quite simple; notifications are read from a text file and shown in a small information box in the home page. The MVC controller –it’s a Java application and we […]
Archive for the 'case study' Category
Everyday Tales: We Call it Unit for a Reason
Published by June 7th, 2010 in agile, case study, components, everyday tales, java, object orientation and software design. 1 CommentEveryday Tales: Anatomy of a Refactoring – Part 3
Published by March 10th, 2010 in agile, books, case study, domain driven design, everyday tales, layers, object orientation, software architecture, software design and trends. 4 CommentsWe finished last post with this funny situation: the abstraction that represents Facebook depends on our Domain Model.
It was a bit obvious that what we needed was not only system abstractions for Facebook, Twitter and the like but Bounded Contexts. We need to acknowledge the fact that these domains are not part of our model, […]
Everyday Tales: Anatomy of a Refactoring – Part 2
Published by March 10th, 2010 in agile, books, case study, domain driven design, everyday tales, layers, object orientation, software architecture, software design and trends. 1 CommentRead the first post here.
In the previous post we were facing the problem demonstrated by the diagram below.
Our FacebookMessageParser needs an instance of AllSocialNetworks so that it can create valid Users coming from Facebook. The only implementation we have for the AllSocialNetworks interface is UserRepository, and this implementation needs a FacebookMessageParser. That’s a circular dependency, […]
Everyday Tales: Anatomy of a Refactoring
Published by February 24th, 2010 in agile, case study, domain driven design, java, layers, object orientation, software architecture, software design and thoughtworks. 11 CommentsI’ve been extremely busy with project after project in the past few months, leaving me no time to do any research and/or play around interesting things. Even though I prefer to write about what is really interesting me at a given moment, I think that writing about some smaller/simpler problems and solutions would be better […]
Duke Nukem Forever and Magic Bags of Money
Published by December 22nd, 2009 in agile, business, case study, digital media, economics, management, thoughtworks and trends. 3 CommentsWired has a very interesting piece on how the Duke Nukem Forever project failed. It’s not only relevant because DNF is part of the nerd culture but also because it is a very interesting tale about a company that could not achieve a reasonable Definition of Done (DoD).
In software development we often talk about Done […]
Watch Your Language!
Published by June 11th, 2009 in business, case study, digital media, domain driven design, domain specific languages, language adaptation, language oriented programming, software design and trends. 10 CommentsIt was one of my first days in the job. I was hired to head the development of several products for a media company and my new boss and I went to my first meeting.
The room was full of different types of people. You could tell those who were media producers from the managers […]
Tag Clouds: See How Noisy Your Code Is
Published by April 29th, 2009 in case study, domain driven design, domain specific languages, java, language oriented programming, software architecture, software design and trends. 14 CommentsIf you follow this blog then you probably know that one of current interests is expressive design, either using Domain-Driven Design or Domain-Specific Languages. Here is a presentation about this topic.
One of the tricky things about expressive code is that it is very hard to see how noisy a code base is. What I found […]
Getting Cloudy: Clojure on Google App Engine
Published by April 8th, 2009 in business, case study, clojure, cloud computing, components, groovy, java, lisp, soa, software architecture, software design, thoughtworks, trends and web. 8 CommentsSome weeks ago I joined a handful of ThoughtWorkers invited to test the new Google AppEngine’s Java API. Unfortunately I had a project requiring a lot of attention during most of this period but once back on the beach I found some time to play around with it.
Cloudy Skies
Google AppEngine (GAE) is Google’s shot in […]
Where do Acceptance Tests go to Die?
Published by September 29th, 2008 in agile, case study, domain specific languages and software design. 12 CommentsMy colleague Sarah Taraporewalla posted an interesting text on acceptance testing. She doesn’t believe in this technique. I’ve been thinking of acceptance tests for some months now and think that she has a valid –a bit too radical but still valid- point.
My main problem with acceptance testing is that they are too wasteful.
They are temporary. […]
BigPharma Problems & Solutions: Have You Seen This Before?
Published by July 1st, 2008 in agile, business, case study, economics, management and trends. 4 CommentsMay 2008’s edition of Harvard Business Review has an article titled ‘Rebuilding the R&D Engine in BigPharma’. In this article Jean-Pierre Garnier -CEO of GlaxoSmithKline- talks about the changes that BigPharma’s R&D process has to face to stay competitive in the new market.
See if you find anything familiar in these quotes:
The most significant [of the […]

