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I'm using Scrum and really liking it. However, my shop finds itself in projects where the duration of the development effort is two or four weeks. We've already modified the sprint length to two weeks, and everyone here says "it'll be Scrum, just with one and a half sprints." I don't think we can get a lot of value f...
I'm a consultant and I am going to introduce unit tests to all developers at my client site. My goal is to ensure that all new applications should have unit tests for all classes created. The client has a problem with high maintenance costs from fixing bugs in their existing applications. Their applications have a life...
Last year, my department developed web based gaming, and needed Flash. It was difficult to manage. The Flash guys didn't fit in regardless of skill or popularity in the office. Maybe it's prejudice from the AS 2.0 days, or C programmers do things differently in my department. I don't get it! EXAMPLE They hired a BAD F...
I am currently building a small python CLI (Command Line Interface) application with ambition. In the first development phase I would concentrate on making it work through the CLI interface only, but in the second phase I will make it work through a GUI. To avoid a lot of refactoring of the functionnalities and to kee...
I come from the web application development and I try to make a small desktop application. I am looking for a good way to build the skeleton of my desktop application. From the web design, the skeleton is mainly handled by the web browser combined with the web server which manage application states (each page could be...
Is it that DirectX is easier or better than OpenGL, even if OpenGL is cross-platform? Why do we not see real powerful games for Linux like there are for Windows?
This is probably going to sound messed up, but here it goes. I've been working on a project for a client for a while now. I wasn't given any details except for "It has to be an XYZ plugin and interface with ABC product". Which was fine, but now we're towards the end (I think) and it's just dragging out. I don't have an...
A bit of background: As a team lead I use NDepend about once a week to check for the quality of our code. Especially the test-coverage, lines of code and cyclomatic complexity metrics are invaluable for me. But when it comes down to levelization and dependency cycles I am a bit ... well concerned. Patrick Smacchia has...
I would like to try and implement some TDD in our web applications to reduce regressions and improve release quality, but I'm not convinced at how well automated testing can perform with something as fluffy as web applications. I've read about and tried TDD and unit testing, but the examples are 'solid' and rather simp...
I've been doing website programming for 15 years and PHP for the last 5 years or so. I've always written solid code. HOWEVER, I have a client that is insisting on 80% of the code being unit tested. Since the client is ALWAYS RIGHT, I am planning on using PHP_CodeSniffer to make sure my code looks right and PHPUnit t...
Eval is a notoriously controversial language feature. Douglas Crockford flat out rejects it. I'm wondering what specific risks Eval brings about. According to this question, Improper use of eval opens up your code for injection attacks. What are some improper uses of the Eval command, and what security holes do they ...
This is neither a Holy War invocation nor is it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/661389/tfs-vs-svn - This question is much more specific and would potentially make a team of developers very happy: I used an earlier version of TFS for two years but I have not used it for years. What advantages does it have over Torto...
I've been interning at a place where my manager believes that if you are in a, product company, then you generally spend time tweaking the product and sometimes adding some features, or service company, then you keep doing repetitive things which makes me feel industry is no place for someone who likes to do create n...
You are conversant with the ZF? How would you go about getting familiar with it in one week? What would be your suggested schedule?
I am doing a project in my university where, for the first time in my life, I have to create a system architecture/design and I will be the head of a group of 4 students that are in the beginning of the course. Basically, I will be able to do everything: I have almost complete independence to choose what exactly the so...
I used to believe the practicing "good" software development methods tends to yield a better product in the long run. However, I've seen quite a few cases where "quick-and-dirty" \ "brute-force" \ "copy-paste" programming appeared to give decent results quicker, and cheaper. This appears especially in cases where time ...
I want to ask you whether adding some "easter eggs" in the source documentation is unprofessional or not. Probably you have read the StackOverflow poll for funny comments in a source documentation, and I have personally stumbled at many such things during my work, including funny (or not) stuff in public API documentat...
I have been looking at a number of document databases (RavenDB, CouchDB, MongoDB) and there are two things about them that I really like and makes me what to incorporate them as much as possible and that is the schema-less natural (not that they are schema-less per-say but that it is a very flexible schema that is much...
I'm trying to get a good grasp of how to implement good decoupling between a UI and the model, but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly where to divide the lines. I've been looking at Model-View-Presenter, but I'm not sure exactly how to go about implementing it. For example, my View has multiple dialogs.. Shoul...
Imagine, there is a resource, for example event. User is able to get list of events in HTML format. He should be able to view that list in two ways: as a list and as a calendar. How the API should respond to this options? The simplest approach, I think, is to pass some parameter to index action to determine which type ...
I am trying to improve the speed of my coding and I was wondering what tips the pros have. Currently I tend to code about 5-10 lines of code then test and repeat. Is that typical? Or is it better to code larger blocks of code then test. I am always worried of coding a lot than realizing all the code I wrote was wrong a...
I'm currently working with C++ MFC applications in Visual Studio 2008. I have spent most of my time up to this point working with Java Swing development which seems to be not quite as involved as win32 or MFC are. I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of little parameters and specifications that go into creating ...
What are some good (or must have) ASP.NET development/debugging tools in addition to Visual Studio IDE? So far the only trick in my pocket is .NET Reflector, that has come in handy before. (I would limit browsers add-ons to IE if possible, since I'm working on a corporate intranet and using FF is not always an option)....
I have a list of products. Each of them is offered by N providers. Each providers quotes us a price for a specific date. That price is effective until that provider decides to set a new price. In that case, the provider will give the new price with a new date. The MySQL table header currently looks like: provider_id, ...
Having used Google Chrome now for a couple of years, I've really gotten to like rolling/automatic updates. I know that most modern software has "automatic updates", but many large pieces of software only have "minor version automatic updates", leaving you to pay to for each major version. Obviously, these companies get...
I've done some application out there, coding is not the problem. But when it comes to deploying / communicating / sharing with colleagues and friends, I'm like stuck. I feel I'm going to be humiliated because there are bugs, and people will not use it ... I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. I can't describ...
A good developer I work with told me recently about some difficulty he had in implementing a feature in some code we had inherited; he said the problem was that the code was difficult to follow. From that, I looked deeper into the product and realised how difficult it was to see the code path. It used so many interface...
I began my programming career in web development using PHP and MySQL. I got quite accustomed to utilizing db for storage of most dynamic data as well as some setting/parameter data. Sometimes there would be a lot of data while other times entries in the tables would be few. To me this just seemed natural and as far ...
I'm a Unix programmer and I need to write a (hopefully simple) program for Windows that does the following: (1) Installs from a USB drive (2) Somehow integrates with the OS at a low-level in such a way that it can filter/shape all network traffic in/out of the machine (a la IPSec) I can write in C, asm, Python, Java, b...
When you have several programming tasks to do at once, do you prefer to go through them one at a time, or to vary them, perhaps based on subtasks or on time? Why? For myself, I find that: Pros for sticking: If I lose my concentration or train of thought, it takes a while to get back into it. If I chug through one ta...
I'm doing my research and stuck with a question: I am having a minimum spanning tree (prim algorithm), now one node in my tree gets deleted, I wonder if there is a way i can re-organize my tree such that the optimality still maintains? I'm looking for some suggestions here and I will appreciate your help. Thank you! No...
I have seen few developers use a tool for designing their application where they simply dragged needed elements (classes, variables, objects) and just did magic work. Then there was a button to generate a code where the design was generated into a C# code after what developer continued to work on software manually. Any...
I just tried integrating my website with facebook. I got a lot of copy-paste code from the facebook developers site. I just put the code and it works fine. Do you call this kind of programmers "code monkeys"? If you say I am a code monkey, in the same case what would you expect me to do?
I'm in the 4th year at an IT university now, and when I talk with my professor about this topic he rejects my opinion and gives me a very heavy criticism (in my university, we were being taught C (ANSI) (in Procedural Programming class - in the 1st year at university ) before C++ (in OOP class in the 2nd year) and othe...
If I am subcontracting from a company. Am I able to claim the work as if I were doing for the client themselves. In other words.... if Client A ask Company A to do some web development. and Company A sub contracts out to Company B. Can Company B claim they did work for Client A. Or must they say they did work for Compa...
Possible Duplicate: Why are software schedules so hard to define? I often need to explain to senior management why software estimation is so hard, and why our preliminary estimates are often so far out. I suspect some want to know why it is not mathematically precise engineering, like building a bridge. You can help...
When I was reading a book for SCJP, I came across the following paragraph. A LinkedList is ordered by index position, like ArrayList, except that the elements are doubly-linked to one another. This linkage gives you new methods (beyond what you get from the List interface) for adding and removing from the beginn...
This PGP library was bought up by Network Associates and then eventually Symantec Corporation. The source code is available and is licensed under the GPL (it was linked to from here). They have a source code license here: http://www.pgp.com/developers/sourcecode/sourcecode_license.html Even though this code is licens...
Regarding pointers which are members of classes. Should they be of a smart pointer type or is it enough to simply deal with them in the destructor of the class they are contained in?
I work for a large enterprise (30K employees) in the financial/insurance industry. While "IT" isn't our main focus, let's be honest, these are information driven industries and the companies with the better technological advantage seem to get ahead faster. There are many software development teams at my company. They a...
For political reasons, management seems intent on keeping a project progressing, but stripping away the most senior developers to perform other higher-priority tasks. Instead one more junior developer will be working on the project while consulting periodically with senior devs. Ostensibly the project will keep progres...
I know the title is a bit vague so I'll try to be more precise in explaining what's my actual question (I apologize in advance if this is a duplicate). I work for a small company (8 people) that works with Linux / PHP / MySQL to deliver various solutions (CRM amongst everything) to several larger financial institutions...
So, I have a couple of projects that I have been working on and I am trying to decide if I want to open source them or provide them for free as closed source. I have never "owned" an open source project before and I would love to hear thoughts on the pros and cons of both options. Any horror stories of deciding on eit...
Although I've been developing web applications for close on 6 years now I still do not know what happens when a request reaches the server. I am looking for book that works through what happens when a request reaches the server and how the server knows which code to call. I'm assuming that there is a old book from the ...
I'm in a Scrum environment, and we get feedback from the PO that all stories should be closed that are currently in progress before bringing in more stories. The goal is reducing WIP and getting stories accepted, which is a good goal. But would it really be wise to have, for instance, a DBA run a manual test script in ...
What are some questions I can ask myself about our design to identify if we should use DTOs or Self-Tracking Entities in our application? Here's some things I know of to take into consideration: We have a standard n-tier application with a WPF/MVVM client, WCF server, and MS SQL Database. Users can define their own in...
I'm managing a team of 10 software developers and I'm looking for a tool which can be used to schedule/assign tasks. I envisage a fairly simple web-based tool which each developer signs into. Here they can see a list of tasks assigned to them. For each task it would be clear how long has been assigned (either the numbe...
Say I have 2 controllers, OrderController and StatusController. OrderController has several CRUD actions for Orders and StatusController has several actions pertinent to changing the satus of Orders (from created to sent, cancelled, etc). StatusController really only has one view where several actions can be performed,...
In an hypothetic situation of a company that have infinite resources (time/budget) to develop a product. can someone list me ALL possible steps that are required in my system development life cycle to reach the goal, in a state of the art software engineering view ? The GOAL of this question is to get a detailed list ...
I understand the purpose of XML, but I always hear people complain about how BAD it is? I don't really understand whats so bad about it? I usually hear the terms "bloated" and "slow" tossed around. But I guess as programmers, what do you mainly use it for? And do you really consider it "bad"....because if it is, an awf...
The generally accepted programming practices I've come across tend to advise against big, sprawling classes. Does using Objective-C categories change the conventional wisdom somehow? Is it more acceptable to have bigger classes if each "subclass" or set of tasks is in its own category? In my own experience, I've foun...
When writing software, what's the point of writing a formal, detailed dead-tree specification? To clarify, a somewhat informal, high-level specification for people who don't want to read the code makes sense to me. A reference implementation in well-commented, readable source code is about the most unambiguous specif...
The Linux kernel is often listed as a code base which you are recommended to read and, even if it is poorly commented (or the files I have looked at have all been), it does have some really good code in it. Now, putting the Linux kernel aside, which other operating system kernels do you recommend people interested in s...
Currently I'm an IT student and I'm wondering what is still important in C++ today, what for is it used? I completed basic C++ course in my university but I can't imagine where can I use my knowledge and in which direction should I go learning C++. In other words what should I learn to become a successful C++ programme...
From your real life experience & executed work. How to choose between starting a project as a Phone App or a Web App ? From what I've read, it is a matter of : the need vs time & $ cash to solve it. I am not sure for the long term & with a limited budget what path to take. My main concerns and comparisons : Phone App...
I have a UI form written using model-view-presenter that has, among other things, a listbox containing a number of different domain objects. The form also contains an add/update button which pulls up a dialog allowing the user to add/update a domain object. The domain-object form is general and is used to gather basic ...
I've been discussing with my colleges about logging in by using your OpenID account, Google account etc. in our customers CMS and/or the internal systems we use, as we've had a few requests regarding this from both existing customers and new. What are your approaches on this? Is this a bad idea? Especially for our cus...
I'm often presented with these two options. From a design point of view, which of these is subjectively better, and why? Option A class foo { private boolean bar() { //Stuff } private void A() { if(bar()) B(); } private void B() { // more stuff } } Option B class foo { private bo...
I want to get started writing extensions for Google Chrome. I am a long time C, C++, Delphi, etc. developer for many years with some Java skills. I believe Chrome extensions are written in C++ but perhaps some people have figured out how to do development in other languages via alternate methods. [UPDATE: NPAPI plug-i...
I've seen a number of questions since I've been here where, in the answer, someone has asserted that they would never use portfolios or code samples coded outside of the interview process to judge a candidate, because there is a possibility of that code having been written by someone else. I find myself surprised by th...
Background: we have recently made a significant change to the UI of our software. All previous versions used a MDI interface (windows floating around inside a parent window.) The new version uses a docked interface (windows snap next to each other, fill all available space, and can be tabbed on top of each other, and...
Let's say that: You have created a FOSS project that other people find useful, perhaps useful enough to donate to or pay for modifications to be done. It is a perfectly legitimate and innocuous software project. It has nothing to do with cryptography as munitions, p2p music, or anything likely to lead to a search warr...
The distinction between block and inline elements always seemed strange to me. The whole difference is that a block element takes up the entire width thus forcing a line break before and after the element, and an inline element only takes up as much as the content. Why not just have one type of element- an inline eleme...
We are currently writing unit test cases in our project . The implementations for database methods exist and is working fine . In this case why do we need to write mock objects ? Is there any specific reason ? Why can't I test the DAO implemntation directly?
I posted some open source code on soureforge, and someone got in contact with me stating they intended to use my algorithms for a commercial product. I don't want this to happen, what should I do? According to us copyright.gov site: "Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangi...
I understand what composition is in OOP, but I am not able to get a clear idea of what Aggregation is. Can someone explain?
Some years ago (more precisely in 1998) the confusion english-speaking people start making with the term free when applied to software led some members of the free software foundation to create a new term: open source ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html ) The great concern was that people was...
A while ago I stumbled upon the concept of using spreadsheets (I mean cells and formulas not Macro code) as a way to specify programming logic. The idea is: create a spreadsheet with a cleanly defined flow of calculations (which sometimes are better suited to the "dataflow" paradigm of spreadsheets instead of procedur...
I have a table which has the amount,entrydate and amtperday field , which is to decrease daily. so what is better running the cron job daily to decrease amount. or or at the time of fetching data calculate the amount perday with the date field , i can get the no. of day amount = amount- no.of day * amtperday so whi...
I'm a python monkey at heart. I eat drink sleep and dream in it, and have found that it's taught me much more about writing quality code than my degree in Computer Science ever did, however I've been asked to write an automated testing project in C# at work to link in with Team Foundation Server. Having looked at the l...
We are currently planning to create a 'preview' version for one of our asp.net mvc apps. Is it allowed to use a company like Microsoft's contoso for such a case (Branding etc.)?
This is pretty much a "software process" question: When your organization is split into two teams: software team and database engineering team (the organization is in ETL/BI/Data mining delivering terabyte sized reports and database dumps for research organization), What are the most common issues in coordination betw...
I've started working on my first open source project on Codeplex and came across some terrible code. (I did learn that C# still has the "goto" statement) I started adding features that the "owner" wanted and after exploring the code base and seeing what a mess it was (e.g using "goto") I wanted to clean it up a bit. Bu...
Have an Excel spreadsheet that summarizes various key metrics for the business. The source data for these metrics comes from various sources including other spreadsheets, and web/ERP systems. A suggestion was made to completely automate the whole data retrieval/population into the spreadsheet. For this type of tool (o...
I am considering making a smart phone app. Before I start, I want to see whether it is worthwhile at all. Unfortunatelly, I find it very hard to find any hard evidence on how much the developers of such apps actually earn either via application purchases, or in-app advertisement. The best research I have found so far s...
How does a Scrum team account for dev/infrastructure tasks in the planning meeting? At first glance, they do not seem like user stories since they do not deliver end user value. However, attaching them as tasks to a particular user story sometimes does not make sense either. For example, say the task is: "Setup Bamb...
I am a fairly novice programmer - 6 months into an internship. I have decided to sign up to an Open Source project to learn new skills, and I have been accepted onto one. It seems the project is quite early in its life. They accept beginner programmers and I have explained that I am one. Obviously as this is my first...
Alright, so I'm doing my first "real" C# project. I'm chugging along, enjoying myself, nice little language I've got here, fairly easy to use, la ti da. Then I get to the point that I realize there's no simple way of setting up friend classes for unit testing. Well. This is unfortunate. I dig around and find that ...
What are the things we need to take care for a web application to handle large number of requests(say 10000 simultaneous requests). Increasing the number of servers and distributing the load is one way , but are there other ways or configurations that can be done on application server ?
I am building software in PHP right now which will be released with a free version and several premium versions. I'd like a license which allows people to freely modify the code, but not to redistribute it, or include it in proprietary software or any other software without a license. Would the MIT license be best?
If the customer has problems which are not reproducible because of complexity of actions they took and can't remember step by step, then coders are missing a test case. Indeed, this issue is apparently authentic and critical, so do you think it is correct to turn away such bugs? What's wrong here? For me it looks as if...
Our team is thinking of doing a "Project In A Week" (bootcamp), and I'm interested to know if anyone else has experience of doing this or has any advice? The idea behind it is to get away from the distractions of the office, motivate each other, and build our bonds within the team, in order to come up with an innovativ...
So I've forked someone else's repository, made a few changes, submitted a pull request, and my changes made it into the product. Great! But...what should I do with my forked repository? Is there a compelling reason for me to keep my repository around, or should I go ahead and delete it? I don't plan on making any addit...
It seems like we still resort to C or C++ when we are going to do "serious" systems programming. We have some small languages which try to come up with new stuff inside systems programming such as Go and D (I have had a little experience with D and I like it a lot so far), but those aren't very widely used (Go is from ...
Do you remember when you were learning JavaScript? What was the moment that you suddenly "got it"? (For example, my CSS aha-moment was when I learnt about the box model...) The reason I´m asking is that I´m learning JS for 6 weeks, but I still find it quite confusing. Here´s a quote from something I read recently on SO...
I love programming. I've been messing around with code since I was a kid. I never went the professional route, but I have coded several in-house applications for various employers, including a project I got roped into where I built an internal transaction management/reporting system for a bank. I pick stuff up quickly,...
I searched for a standard format for using a date/time as part of a file name and was unable to come up with anything. My question is two parts: Is using time stamps to enforce unique in file names a poor practice? I could get the time from the creation date and serialize the file names (file0001.bak, file0002.bak, et...
I have been curious about this for a while. What exactly is meant by "production-ready" or its variants? Most recently I was looking for information about sqlite and found this thread, where many people suggest sqlite isn't ready for production. I know the difference between development/testing and production; my defin...
I'm trying to determine a way to distribute software updates for a hosted/on-site web application that may have weekly and/or monthly updates. I don't want the customers who use the on-site product to have to worry about updating it manually I just want it to download and install automatically ala Google Chrome. I'm pl...
Every time you are looking for a text editor, no matter what language you are using, vi and Emacs are hall-of-famers. However they are ancient, and we have better alternatives (at least I hope we do). Why are developers stuck on these two editors? Shouldn't we drop them and try to invent or look for something new? (...
I'm looking for suggestions on effective methods that I can use to document, remember and prioritize tasks at work. Many of the these tasks belong to a primary project, but they also exist for independent initiatives. The tasks themselves cover everything from development to documentation to discussions, with varying...
I would like a recommendation on choosing which light-bulb type (e.g. CFL) and color temperature is best for prolonged computer usage. I am also in a field where color consistency is important so if a specific lamp temperature is useful, I would like to know as well.
I have been struggling lately with the whole subject of documentation at my current position. I am at a point in my programming career in which I feel I have just been birthed into the whole world of proper and effective documentation. Currently there is very little to be found in any database or source code at the c...
I used to be an iPhone app developer. Now there are frequent enquires on cross-platform mobile app. So I look for a web based solution and find Sencha Touch. Are there more options? What's your experience and comment on these frameworks? Thanks!
(This question was closed on Stack Overflow due to being "too broad" and "not a real question" so maybe it's more appropriate here?) Inspired by this question. We know events are a language-level implementation of the Observer pattern. Are there other design patterns implemented as language features in C#? I want to ke...
I'll cut to the chase. I'm looking for advice on how an experienced developer would convince a prospective employer that they should be considered for a position that uses another language. This is with other non-language specific requirements being met (knowing version control, OO, degree, etc...). For example an expe...
I'm looking for good reference on patterns that apply to user security and ACLs for multi-user network applications. I'm re-writing a fairly large application from scratch. Now I'm looking at the user management and security. I'm not so interested in user meta data, but rather ACLs and security. Right now the applicati...
I'm just learning HTML, but some say XHTML is better. The W3C recommends XHTML, and I know W3C is more credible, right?
Let's say I'm planning to sell a .NET application in my website. If I need to use a library A (a reference to the compiled assembly, not the source code)... Under which license could be A so I can do this?
So I've worked in many different workplaces as a developer and my level of access to the database has been varied. I typically don't have production db access. Most of the time I have access to the test database, but it varies. Sometimes I can do and change database and data as I please, but usually there are other ar...

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