This prototype works, but it's not pretty, and now it's in production. That legacy application really needs some TLC. Where do we start? When creating long lived applications, it's imperative to focus on good practices. The solution is to improve the whole development life cycle; from planning, better coding and testing, to automation, peer review and more. In this talk, we'll take a quick look into each of these areas, looking at how we can make positive, actionable change in our workflow.

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Michael Bush at 20:25 on 14 Mar 2018

Very good talk and agreed with all of the points the speaker brought up. The talk helped me solidify my knowledge already gained and fill in some gaps where I was not sure. The speaker has good engagement with the audience and spoke clearly and stayed on topic.

A really good overview of different aspects of quality in software, not just in the code.

Fairly high level which was good to introduce a range of concepts without fogging the brains of the inexperienced nor lose the attention of the experienced.

It would be good to work on use of “right” at the end of sentences.

The tips for further reading are really useful, any more of those that are relevant would be appreciated!

MattRink at 20:27 on 14 Mar 2018

A great talk with lots of useful ideas for how to improve quality. It is an opinionated talk but that allowed James to be very detailed in a wide range of areas. A little bit of help as to how to convert other team members and other people who are less inclined to think the same way would be useful.

Very informative talk covering a lot of things but in a engaging style to keep my attention. I’m looking forward to the slides so I can get dive into some of the areas in more detail.
Insightful speaker - will look out for more of his talks

Matt Biddle at 20:32 on 14 Mar 2018

Very informative talk and well humoured making it all the more enjoyable to listen to. Possibly a little too long though. Other than that very well done. Thanks.

Phil Mobbs at 20:33 on 14 Mar 2018

Really interesting talk, liked references for further reading/watching on a the subject and how it covered not only code but also processes.

Perhaps some areas could be more concise

Eugenio Pombi at 20:34 on 14 Mar 2018

Good valuable points. Couldn't agree more.

Loads of good topics covered here. I guess the only problem is that, with so much covered, you weren't able to go into much detail. Maybe you need to come back and do some more detailed talks? Thanks.

Kiel Doyle at 20:38 on 14 Mar 2018

Very informative talk. Great primer for those yet to implement the concepts covered and good suggestions and encouragement for those of us already trying to do so.

Could benefit from more concrete real-world examples, but fully understand given the breadth of the subjects covered and the time constraints why this is not possible.

Jergus Lejko at 20:40 on 14 Mar 2018

Good, professionally crafted talk. Easy to follow, easy to listen to. One suggestion would be to include cleaner code examples with better highlighting as the ones in the talk we're a bit harder to read.

10/10

A thorough and well planned talk!

To make a petty suggestion I thought it was heavy to testing, and I’d have liked to see more about code review, and how to make good suggestions.

Amazing talk with some great analogies and descriptions. Only downside was that the slides were lacking information for people who are better at absorbing information visually than audibly.

Dan Ackroyd at 12:53 on 15 Mar 2018

I think a structural improvement could be made to the talk by breaking some of it up into 'chunks' that covered a concept, with little breaks between those chunks. Particularly for the last quarter of the talk, where it felt quite like the speaker was just going through a big list of stuff, rather than telling a coherent story.

The readability of the code slides could be improved by really optimising the layout for slides e.g. Code snippets don't need declare(strict_types=1). Gray comments on gray background are never going to work. If possible losing the titles and footer for slides that have code on them would make more space avaiable.

I'd change slide 91 to 98 to all be on 1 slide (possibly with each item appearing separately with fragments). This allows people to see the whole list at once when you get to the end, which makes it easier to re-read or take photo.

A lot of the text could be a lot bigger. e.g. slide 12 which has "Products - Long-live projects. Open source software." There is plenty of space for both lines to be 3 times the size, which would make it easy to read at the back.

A great talk about all areas of code quality. Lots of useful bits.

To improve: I'd like to see references to stats that give the business case for doing things like testing / code review that you can take to non developers / managers. As developers we shouldn't spend days improving performance of code without first getting a baseline to use as a reference to see if we've actually improved things. It is a reasonable question for a manager to ask what the cost benefit analysis of activities like code review and testing are.