Mario Van Damme's blog

A lot of people would agree that design reviews can bring a lot of value to building quality software. However, when it comes to actually doing a design review we enter a somewhat blurry environment where everybody has another view on what a design is, how in-depth it should be etc, how it should be organised, etc.
Based on my own experience, I want to share some tips and best practices with you...

I'm glad to announce the publishing of my next article here at Developerstar*.com : 'OO Case Tools : Lost opportunities and future directions'.

This is the direct link :

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/oo_case.html

Note that it was publised in July already, but I was on a well deserved? :-) vacation.

From time to time, many of us are confronted with Oracle databases. Whether it's for capturing the database schema, to exchange data, to write a database application, etc. This blog entry will give you some tips on how to do this without a lot of suffering.

I noticed an interesting question on the UML forum which I think a lot of people are struggling with, therefore I took the effort to put it on my blog. The problem was the following: You have a set of use cases and a large set of roles. The stakeholders are not only interested in the use cases as such, but they also want to see which role has which responsibility. In other words: Who can do what?

I have an urgent need to talk about a disease which is a threat to the health of the software we create: "refactor-itis".

Many people don't worry about metadata; rather they are only interested in their data. However, metadata is extremely important as it describes the semantics of 'what' the data represents. In this article, I'll briefly try to convince you of the importance of metadata. After that, I'll discuss some metadata approaches.

Although the title might allude to a phrase in the newest Star Wars movie, the context of this article is more serious. First of all, it is good that people read books. However, they need to be interpreted correctly. How often aren’t design patterns misused for the fun of it? This blog article is about another aspect which made its revival with test driven design (TDD) and extreme programming (XP). This article will focus on the ‘danger’ that lies in the unmanaged use of assertions.