Alessio Ferri and Tom Coggrave complete their article about introducing seams into mainframe systems by looking how we can use data replication. Done well, it can provide a rapid start to a displacement effort, but we must be wary of it coupling new systems to the legacy schema more ..read more

Mainframe processing is often organized into pipelines of batch processes consuming and creating data files. Alessio Ferri and Tom Coggrave show a couple of ways they found to introduce seams into these pipelines, so that processing could be replaced by steps in a replacement platform. more ..read more

Alessio Ferri and Tom Coggrave move on to analyzing the internal seams of the application by treating the database as a coarse-grained seam. They describe how they introduced seams into the database readers and writers. more ..read more

As the enmuskification of Twitter continues, I’ve increasingly heard that more people are using LinkedIn to keep up with new professional material. So, a couple of weeks ago, I set up my LinkedIn account, so people can follow me on that platform. I’ve always avoided LinkedIn - I’ve found the whole vibe of connections rather off-putting. I get too much spam from people wanting to connect as it is. But LinkedIn has added a “creator mode”, which encourages people to follow someone for posts rather than the bi-directional connection. It seems to be working reasonably well so far, so I’ve decided t ..read more

John Kordyback, a treasured colleague and friend, died last week, aged 64. more ..read more

Alessio Ferri and Tom Coggrave start detailing the seams they explored with two areas of external interfaces. Batch input of files are copied to new implementations while comparing the output of the processing pipelines. API access points can be covered with a proxy and traffic gradually directed to the new implementation. more ..read more

Mainframe systems continue to run much of the world's computing workload, but it's often difficult to add new features to support growing business needs. Furthermore the architectural challenges that make them slow to enhance also make them hard to replace. To reduce the risk involved, we use an incremental approach to legacy displacement, gradually replacing legacy capabilities with implementations in modern technology. This strategy requires us to introduce seams into the mainframe system: points in which we could divert logic flow into newer services. In a recent project Alessio Ferri and ..read more

Abi Noda and Tim Cochran complete their article on qualitative metrics by outlining how to capture them effectively. They discuss the mental steps that people go through as they respond to a survey and provide a template to get started when assessing developer experience. A final section looks at how qualitative and quantitative work together: often by starting with qualitative metrics to establish baselines and determine where to focus, followed with quantitative metrics to drill deeper into specific areas. more ..read more

From time to time people ask me for a copy of the code I used in the opening chapter of Refactoring, so they can follow along themselves. I had Reasons for not providing this code, specifically laziness. Fortunately Emily Bache is more dedicated, and she has set up a github repository - the Theatrical Players Refactoring Kata - with the code, and enough tests to make it reasonable to do the refactoring. The repository goes further than this, however, in that it includes similar sample code in a dozen languages, including C, Java, Rust, and Python. She has recently posted a video to her YouTub ..read more

When pair programming, it's important to rotate the pairs frequently, but many organizations that do pair programming are reluctant to do that. Gabriel Robaina and Kieran Murphy ask the question: “What if we rotate pairs every day?” and worked with three teams through an exercise of daily pair rotation. They developed a lightweight methodology to help teams reflect on the benefits and challenges of pairing and how to solve them. Initial fears were overcome and teams discovered the benefits of frequently rotating pairs. They learned that pair swapping frequently greatly enhances the benefits o ..read more