Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

25.1. Back to the Real World

I've written a lot about software quality, development practices and application maintenance. Only you know the quality of the code and the quality of the solutions you develop. There are good practices and there are bad practices. You may already be thinking about how you would set about implementing some of the messages in this book on your own projects to improve quality. If it were me, I'd firstly list the key principles and practices and then determine whether the solution employed them. If not, I'd determine whether the practice was required and if so, I'd look at the implications of implementing the practice appropriately.

This section actually looks at performing this exercise against a sample code base. For the purposes of this exercise, the source code doesn't adhere to all the principles discussed. It isn't production-ready, nor is it a complete solution. It is used solely for demonstration and example purposes. There are good points and there are many areas for further development.

I've listed some of the categories and included some of the key principles in the table that follows.

Category	Practices
Application Maintenance	The solution should differentiate what it intended for production vs. testing. The solution should provide a meaningful "at-a-glance" overview of the solution structure. Switch on the profiler — Treat warnings as errors. When errors are raised these can be assessed, downgraded or suppressed. Use XML comments for documentation ...