Category Software Engineering

What follows is a summary of the kind of exchange I have on a daily basis as a software engineer. I’ve obfuscated some details for obvious reasons.

Client: Here’s a document that contains a list of events we’d like you to integrate into the app. We need every event that the document contains.

For illustration purposes, let’s say it’s a document with a list of numbers from 1 to 10.

Me: Thanks. I’ll add those right away.

Some time later…

Me: Hi. I’ve added those events: 1-10 are all in there and verified as working.

Client: Events 11 and 12 are not coming through. Here is the document again. Please ensure that all of the events in the document are added.

Me: The document doesn’t contain events 11 and 12. It’s just 1-10...

In software engineering, a framework is an abstraction in which software that provides generic functionality can be modified by implementation-specific code in order to result in application-specific software.

So SOLID

A good framework adheres to the SOLID principles of object-oriented design. These principles are:

1. Single responsibility principle. A class should do just one thing (and do it well).
2. Open/close principle. A class should be open for extension but be closed for modification.
3. Liskov substitution principle. Objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without breaking the application. See: polymorphism.
4. Interface segregation principle. Many client-specific interfaces are better than fewer general-purpose interfaces.
5. Dependency inversion princip...

The BBC’s Future Media department promotes the use of four key principles across its engineering teams, known as “The 4 Good Things”.

The interpretation of these principles tends to vary a little across each team, but generally speaking they provide a consistent approach to software development across a number of different projects, platforms and languages.

Here are those four principles along with my personal interpretations.

For a couple of years now, JavaScript has been encroaching into territory traditionally held by Flash. At the BBC’s TVMP department, news of set top boxes making the switch to JavaScript seems to be an almost daily occurrence as manufacturers fall over themselves to jump onto the JavaScript bandwagon for alleged “faster development” and the mythical “build once, deploy everywhere” utopian ideal.

I’ve witnessed the repetition of such claims myself. “We’ll be switching this product to JavaScript in the near future because – obviously – it’s faster” a product owner once said, followed by the nodding heads and murmurs of agreement of other non-developers.

The reality for those of us who have not succumbed to the merry tune of the JavaScript Pied Piper’s flute is that “build once, deploy e...

Before work on the BBC Events application could begin, a framework was required that would provide the team with a foundation on which to build a robust, memory-efficient app that could be re-skinned for future events.

I completed the majority of the work in an intensive 3 days which allowed the rest of the team to begin work on the app itself. Embellishments were applied over the remainder of the week.

The core framework is designed around the BBC’s One Service UI which is a drive to use a consistent UX across all current and future products.

It allows for efficient use of specialised components which are created and destroyed at runtime based on what the application requires to render each feed...

At the end of November last year the BBC launched the Connected Red Button service on Virgin TiVo, along with updated versions of the iPlayer, News and Sport apps. This package also consisted of a fifth release: an application that is both integral and vital to each of the above apps, yet few are even aware of its existence!

Xenon is a brand new embedded media player that was developed specifically for AS2 embedded devices such as Virgin’s TiVo, to be used by applications like iPlayer, News, Sport and any other such applications that the BBC develops in future.

The development of a new player was actually driven by Connected Red Button...

Company: SoftPerfect
Product: Connection Emulator
Price: From $149.00

While working on the BBC Sports app for Virgin TiVo, it would be safe to say that I encountered more problems than one would expect to on such a project. Some of them seemed to be bugs in Adobe’s StageCraft (Flash Lite 3.1), others seemed to be inconsistencies in the implementation of the Flash player on the box and still others came from unexpected content delivery network behaviour. As a result there were a number of feature-related tasks that turned out to be more difficult to implement than they perhaps should have been, and as a team we spent a number of days in total investigating causes of unexpected and/or undesirable behaviour in the app that resulted from these issues.

Still, this post isn’t about reflecting on...

Just over four months have passed now since I started contracting at the BBC – four months that have flown by like days!

Today the primary purpose of my contract was released into the wild: the BBC Sports F1 application for Virgin TiVo. The public release of this application means that I am finally allowed to talk about it which is a great relief because not being able to talk about such an exciting project was really quite difficult!

The application enables users to watch all the BBC’s interactive coverage for major sporting events such as Formula One, Wimbledon, Euro 2012 and London 2012 with live streams, on-demand video and other additional content.

More information can be found on the BBC’s internet blog.

Finally, if a picture is worth a thousand words then a video must be worth a tho...

Back in the mid-late ’90s, Sega’s 32-bit Saturn was in the process of losing ground to Sony’s PlayStation, mostly due to a series of stupid decisions from Sega themselves. From hurriedly throwing together a machine that was incredibly difficult to program to asking for £400 for it on release (equivalent to between £600 and £707 today), Sega seemed pretty determined to make the Saturn an unattractive proposition for both developers and consumers alike.

As a result of being both difficult to program and the subject of a much smaller user-base, the Saturn was often the recipient of low quality, rushed games that looked (and sometimes played) terribly compared to PlayStation equivalents...

Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to measure the complexity of code. Specifically, it directly measures the number of linearly independent paths through a method. Although not a rule, generally speaking the quality of the code can be inversely proportional to the cyclomatic complexity value, so the lower the score, the higher quality the code.

One of the best programs that I’ve found for quantifying this metric is SourceMonitor. This handy little freeware tool will give you the cyclomatic complexity of your classes as well as the individual methods within those classes so you can see exactly what requires attention in the event of a high score. It also gives other feedback too, such as number of lines of code and the number of methods per class among others.

Why should you ca...