Nikos Voulgaris

How many times have you experienced software engineering teams that, regardless of the reasons, opted for quick solutions, resulting in poor code quality and created problems that accumulated over time? Where did this lead? Eventually, the product resembles an iceberg. The stakeholders can only see the end result, the behavior of the system, the part of the iceberg that lies above the surface, unaware of what lies underneath it. However, the software engineers have the full picture. ...

Taking a step back and looking at something that you’ve been doing for years with a fresh perspective can lead to profound insights. I had an insight exactly like this a few months ago, when I decided to look at getters and setters from a different point of view. During my first steps as a software engineer, I learned about Plain Old Objects (POJOs for Java software engineers, like myself) and ever since it made sense in my head, I always took getters and setters for granted. ...

How many times have you found yourself engaged in a retrospective, wondering why do you lose all this time? How many times have you committed to action items that no one ever dealt with in any way? How many times have you caught your team or yourself discussing the same issues again and again thinking that this will not be the last time? Retrospectives are very hard-to-drive meetings. The hurdles to overcome are countless. ...

Scrum has gone wrong in a number of ways. This is a fact. Agile, an initiative born by software engineers, has turn into a new, cool product management way. A considerable number of companies advertise that they use scrum when all they do is run a standing, 15-minute meeting in the morning and use sticky notes, being totally oblivious the true mindset of the framework as well as the immense benefits that it can provide. ...

One of the most disturbing questions I often get refers to the percentage of the code that should be covered by unit tests. This is a perfectly fine question coming from a fairly inexperienced developer, but it troubles me greatly in virtually any other case. However, what urged me to write this post is that I gradually become aware of more and more organizations that actually impose rules on this metric. ...

Among other things, scrum is very “trendy” lately. Virtually any company that I know of has either adopted it or attempted to do so or at least considered it. The software industry needs change rapidly, evolving the scrum master in one of the most sought after roles. However, the inability of the offer to meet the demand and the absence of required technical skills to become a scrum master has made the role appealing to a number of people outside the industry, giving birth to an ongoing debate. ...

Over the years, I have identified a number of issues with the way most companies treat their tests. I have come to believe that the most important one is that test code is treated as a second class citizen. Developers usually opt for the cheap, quick-and-dirty solutions when it comes to writing (or maintaining) tests, not realizing their importance. However, test code has to be designed, reviewed and refactored, exactly like production code. ...

Designing APIs for inter microservice communication is one of the most difficult aspects of modern software engineering and the reasons range in a very broad spectrum. First of all, microservices is a relatively new trend and virtually everyone in the software engineering community talks about them nowadays. However, I believe that we still don’t know what exactly they are (let alone how they will develop in the future) and therefore, we can’t always design them in an efficient way. ...

As part of the onboarding process of every new developer in Tripsta, I am required to deliver a training on unit testing basics. I would like to share the most valuable techniques, methodologies and best practices that I have collected over the years. I believe that they constitute the pillars of a solid foundation that every developer should have. It may be a bit unconventional (the way I love it), but before we even start, let me clarify the two most important things that tests are not. ...