In times when many of us work from home, due to COVID-19, we thought it would be nice to have some interesting articles about software quality at hand.

This post outlines two collections: the 5 most read blog posts from 2019 and hand-picked articles tackling questions that frequently pop up in our work.

TOP 5 Reads in 2019

1. Our most read article in the blog is about McCabe’s Cyclomatic Complexity. In »McCabe’s Cyclomatic Complexity and Why We Don’t Use It« you can read, why we do not advise to use it in quality analyses.
2. Even though we love thoroughly tested software, sometimes there are good reasons why one wants to skip the testing stage in a Gitlab-CI build. For a technical explanation of how we use our commit message to skip tests if needed, have a look at »Skipping Tests in GitLab CI«.
3. SAP ABAP is a language that varies in its ways of usage and possibilities. If you are working with ABAP code and coding sometimes feels cumbersome (or you just want to know how we work with ABAP), have a look at »Coding ABAP Like Java«.
4. Conditional compilation using preprocessor features like #ifdef (in C/C++) is very powerful. Read up on how this flexibility can lead to different problems in »Living in the #ifdef Hell«.

5. This 2014 article about how string replacements slowed down one of our analyses—and how we fixed it—also caught attention last year: »Why is Java’s String#replace() so slow?«.

Additional Evergreens

• Have you ever calculated the sinus of the square root of the ratio of comments in your code? Nope? Then you probably did not miss a thing. TOP6 read (2019): »Why we don’t use the Software Maintainability Index«
• Much more likely than calculating the above, you copied some piece of code to start over with it in another system part. Do you know, that this increased clone coverage? If you want to gain deeper insights on the effects of clones, start here: »Practical Guide to Code Clones«
• Find out, why we, as Quality Engineers, publish an article titled »Don’t Fix All Your Quality Deficits« on our blog.
• How strong is the effect of introducing an automated tool to assess software quality and/or involving a quality engineer? Read here: »Does Quality Control Really Make Your Code Better?«
• Identify relevant static analysis findings and put them into a work item: »Quality Tasks and Quality Goals«
• Can you find everything in your code review? We think that we cannot and that the code review process is difficult to persist in a checklist. Read »Lessons from Code Reviews (pt. 1)« and pt. 2.

If you have another article from our blog in mind that is missing in this list, let us know! And please continue sending us feedback about articles -this one included