QWAN - Quality Without a Name

Our Services

Consultancy and Mentoring

We take a holistic, systemic approach to grow your development organization. An effective software development organization needs to attend to technical skills, agile processes, team organization, and personal growth.

Training

We deliver courses on (agile) software development. Small groups, intensive courses, hands on, VERY interactive ... & fun!

Development

Have we mentioned that we're software developers? We are. And we're passionate about the quality of our work. We believe that for sustainable development, we need state-of-the-art practices like test driven development, continuous integration and relentless refactoring.

Werken met Rob en Marc is een bijzonder geruststellende en inspirerende ervaring. Ze hebben in onze transitie naar een totaal nieuw systeem, nieuwe architectuur en een hernieuwde definitie van craftsmanship een cruciale rol gespeeld. Met hun unieke stijl vertalen ze hun verbluffende kennis en ervaring naar kleine stapjes en hebben ons daarin meegenomen op een manier dat we werkelijk het idee hebben dat we het zelf bedacht hebben. Wat dit betekent voor draagvlak en slagkracht moge duidelijk zijn. Zonder Rob en Marc was ons dit niet gelukt.

-Geert Bossuyt, delivery manager at ZorgDomein

Duurzaam Agile software ontwikkelen vergt niet alleen een Agile mindset, maar ook een Agile skillset. QWAN heeft ons geholpen om die te ontwikkelen. Niet door advies vanaf de zijlijn, maar door actieve participatie op het spelveld. Samen de handen vuil maken en lering trekken uit de praktijk. De ene keer door het stellen van coachingsvragen, de andere keer door het voorbeeld te geven of door het geven van instructie. Steeds wat nodig is om verder te groeien als ontwikkelaar en als team.

-Hans Kalle, development manager at RIGD-Loxia

At your TDD training course, I actually learned something! (comparing with other unit testing courses)

-A course participant

Very educational (as I expected); I can definitely apply this in my project

-A course participant

“This was the first training where I had:
- no problem to stay awake
- no problem with the afternoon "dip"
- no problem to stick to the subject
- no problem completing the exercises.

-A course participant

Our Blog

Literate adventures in C - warming up

18 March 2021

Jez Higgins and Chris Oldwood recommended The Practice of Programming book to me when we were working on an enterprise C++ project. It is from the same vintage as Extreme Programming Explained and Refactoring, but quite different. It is multi-language, but some of the exercises are in C (not surprising, given the authors’ backgrounds). I got started on it last year, but life got in the way, and I needed to practice my C a bit before being able to do anything meaningful in it. Now that Rob and I are prepping for a C++ TDD / Legacy code training next month, I’m in the right frame of mind to also dive deeper into C.

Slicing your Cake - Structuring your Hexagons

15 February 2021

You are happily applying the Hexagonal Architecture pattern. You have hidden the unpredictable outside world behind ports and adapters, so you can speak your domain language. Awesome! But now your domain model grows as well. How do you keep that understandable? Imagine the inside of your hexagon was a cake. How would you slice your domain?

When (not) to use feature toggles

01 February 2021

In this post, we will reflect on the practice of using feature toggles. As more and more development organizations are moving towards continuous delivery, we see them using feature toggles more and more. It is, once again, not a best practice, but one that comes with trade-offs. We are not implying feature toggles are bad, but we urge you to be aware of the trade-offs and risks involved, and to take a critical look at how you are using them.

Wrapping dates, logging and UUIDs in concepts of their own

12 January 2021

In our previous post on Hexagonal Architecture in a back-end, we mentioned wrapping ID generation and timestamps in concepts of their own. This might feel a bit over-designed, but we have reasons to do so. In this post, we share the trade-offs and rationale behind wrapping the standard stuff in abstractions of your own.