“Stop Talking, Start Doing”

Introduction

Hi,

I’m Markus and this blog is my personal place for collecting interesting stuff about reengineering, Software Analytics, learning, and agility. I work as a consultant at INNOQ Germany. I enjoy working out new software analysis techniques for managing legacy code and I also like to get my hands dirty to fix things in broken systems.

Background

As a child, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was fascinated by the idea of discovering, analyzing and newly interpreting cultural relics from the past. But after I tried to start my first computer game from a 5.25″ floppy disk with a format B: command, I was even more fascinated by the mystery of computers than old stones. So I studied computer science and specialized in software rehab, Software Analytics, and Clean Code. Today, my passion is discovering, analyzing and newly interpreting software relics from the past.

Mission

I’m very disappointed that we do the same failures in software development over and over again. We are fixing just the immediate symptoms and not the important problems. It’s even worse: We only see one symptom at one place in our application – but we think it is the one and only problem and don’t look for a pattern at all! Thus, we will never get to the root cause of the symptom that lurks in all the other places of the application. Not to mention the missing increase of developer productivity with this “symptoms treating”, leaving management in doubt about spending money for further, real technical improvements.

I try to do my part to make software development better:

  • I analyze data from software systems like source code, application performance data or version repositories to show the underlying problems of the symptoms we face on the surface (see markusharrer.de for more on this).
  • I also share my thoughts and experience about how to create automated, data-driven, reproducible analysis of software data at this blog, conferences and meetups.
  • At last, I’m contributing to Open Source projects (mainly jQAssistant and aim42) by committing code as well doing marketing on various occasions.

We can do better! Just care!

 

Foot note: “feststelltaste” is the German word for “Caps Lock”. The German verb “feststellen” means “to determine” or “to find out” in English. I think that’s a good fit! It’s also a very common term on the internet, so you can’t find me via Google easily 😉