Getting Delivery Right: Software Development Methodologies in Practice

Introduction Software development methodologies describe structured approaches that guide the process of building software systems. These methodologies provide frameworks, practices, and principles to manage the complexities of software development projects efficiently. At Sinara, we recognise the importance of flexibility in project approaches and adopting the methodology most suitable to a particular project and client goals. […]

Component-Based Testing – Reusable test steps as building blocks for test cases

At Sinara, testing is an integral part of our software development process and the success of project delivery and launch can depend on the quality of testing applied. Over the years, it is an area in which we have made significant investment, carefully exploring different approaches and developing a comprehensive framework for testing software applications. […]

Unit Testing Private Methods Within a Class

This article is part of a series on software testing that will be expanded and updated over time. Software testing is a wide and varied subject, so we will aim to draw attention to certain topics of interest in a number of areas. This entry considers the unit testing of private methods within a class. Many (more…)

Unhandled Exceptions in .NET

At Sinara, we build many server-side applications that must run 24×7 and cope successfully with the myriad problems that might occur in any live production system, including network outages, disk space problems, server restarts, slow connections, etc. We therefore devote a great deal of development time to ensuring that the code we build is resilient and can […]

Market Data APIs

Earlier this year, as one of Sinara’s founding directors, I participated in a financial market data industry panel that covered the topic of Market Data APIs. This Blog post covers some of my views on the subjects discussed at that event, based on my industry experience and role as one of the system architects of […]

SignalR Coding Best Practices

ASP.NET SignalR is a library for adding real-time web functionality to applications. It allows server-side code to push content to connected clients as it happens, in real-time. We are seeing more and more SignalR applications come along. Whether it is the preferred technology or not, I think most .NET web-app developers will have to get comfortable […]

Unit Testing: A Personal View

When I started my career as a software developer over 30 years ago the waterfall model was the main game in town and my role was module design, code and unit test. The design was “Structured”, the coding language Z80 Assembler and C, but the unit tests? Well to be honest, unit testing was just […]

Dynamically Generating Excel Workbooks

Recently, developers here at Sinara have built a number of applications that have involved dynamically generating large numbers of Excel spreadsheets from database tables. In some cases, the spreadsheets had simple layouts, with just raw numbers in cells, whilst others had more sophisticated formatting and charts. In addition to the core functionality, the performance of the […]

Supporting ‘problem’ IT systems

We all know that when looking at the lifetime of any software project, that the longest phase is support and maintenance. It’s the unglamorous, but highly important task of keeping the system running and often changing it to fit in with changing business or technical requirements. Larger organisations with well-developed project processes normally plan this […]