Nobroken windows

This week we have Patrick Smacchia, the creator of NDepend. We will discuss software maintainability, and for that, Patrick will share his opinion on the heuristic “No broken windows” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/no-broken-windows/). Patrick’s shares his experiences, from the early stages of his career to today. We share his principles and practices regarding software maintainability and how it is encoded in NDepend. We also have a glimpse over his views on testing!

Patrick recommends the following resources:

• NDepend Blog - https://blog.ndepend.com/
• Design by Contract, from Bertrand Meyer - https://bertrandmeyer.com/category/design-by-contract/
• Scott Hanselman - https://www.hanselman.com/
• 3Blue1Brown on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

Patrick has been fortunate to start programming as a child on 8bits computers in the 80s. Then he naturally graduated in Math and Software engineering. After a decade of C++ programming and consultancy, Patrick got interested in the brand new .NET platform in 2002. He wrote the best-seller book (in French) on .NET and C#, published by O’Reilly and also did manage some academic and professional courses on the .NET platform and C#.

Over the years, Patrick gained a passion for understanding the structure and evolution of large complex real-world applications and good practices to improve software maintainability. As a consequence, he got interested in static code analysis and started the project NDepend.