Sam Bryan

For this week’s blog on Software Architecture, I listened to Episode 3 of the “Software Architecture Radio” Podcast, which featured Mark Richards, an independent software architect. He has 32 years in the industry, with more than twenty years as a software architect.  They mostly talked about the evolution of software architecture. Although some of the things they talked about went a little over my head, I was able to pick up on the majority of what they were talking about.  He divided up the evolution of architecture into five stages. He talked about evolution happening in vertical and horizontal slices, that is within each layer and one layer affecting those above and around it. The layers were (1) hardware, (2) software, (3) human interaction, (4) social interaction, and (5) the environment, such as the internet of things. He said one thing in particular, need, drives change the fastest. As an aside, he also said that that’s the best way of teaching something i...

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

For this week’s blog on software design, I chose to watch a video presented by Dr. Steve Bagley on some fundamentals of object oriented programming (OOP). I’m embarrassed to say that although I am taking several upper-level computer science classes, I am unsure I would be able to give a good definition of what object oriented design was. To be fair though, it has been several years since I have taken CS 101, and it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. I felt silly learning about something so elementary again, but it made a lot more sense when I’ve had as much exposure to OOP as I have now. For the video, he uses a game of “Pong” as an example of how OOP might use objects to represent the “ball” and “paddles.” From there, he talked some about inheritance and touched on a few more topics, albeit briefly. The main reason why I didn’t understand the benefit of this way of programming is that I didn’t know how else you would do it. I didn’t realize that without declari...

For this weeks blog for the topic Quality Assurance and Testing, I read an article titled “5 Reasons you are wasting your testing time.” That is not to say that testing is a waste of time, but rather as the first sentence says, “Not all our testing time is spent effectively.” The blog goes on to list the five reasons that a programmer might be using their testing time ineffectively, which are as follows: (1) “You don’t set a clear goal for your testing task;” (2) “You don’t understand the value of the feature for your End User;” (3) “You do not keep track of what you tested, your findings and the other ideas you got while testing;” (4) “You do not consult existing information to get insights into your test;” And (5) “You do not do post-test reviews and feedback sessions with your peers.” These are all straightforward ideas, but I’m sure most programmers testing their code have fallen into several of these, if not all. This list provides a framework to avoid these pitfalls. In class...