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Coming from a scrum environment with no integrated testing support and an independent minded QA staff, how is a tester (QA person) best integrated with a scrum team? What should they do? For reference some test functions are: Unit Testing Integration Testing Functional Testing Performance Testing Acceptance Testing
Change is not uncommon, change in requirements, change in specs change in workflow. I've accepted that there will be change, but I wonder: knowing that change is going to happen, how short of a planning period is too short? (Justifications are encouraged) An iteration (2-4 weeks)? A week? A 2-3 day period? A day? 1/2 ...
Say you have 5 customers, you develop 2 or 3 different projects for each. Each project has Xi tasks. Each project takes from 2 to 10 man weeks. Given that there are few resources, it is desired to minimize the management overhead. Two questions in this scenario: What tools would you use to prioritize the tasks and tr...
I'm drowning in user emails and I'd like to implement a better way to manage all these requests I get and put them in a queue where those people on a team, as well as users, have access to them and can make common notes. I'm thinking about some sort of task management tool that would allow multiple tasks to be created ...
Tell me if this sounds familiar: something something something... as seen in figure 1-1 on the next page... It's in practically every book I've ever read about programming. So when I was writing a small instructional booklet on how to use some in-house software, which had images of the screen that the user will be o...
At what point does a developer stop being simply a developer and turns into a software architect. Or in other words, what's the minimum job description of a software architect?
A few weeks ago, my class was assigned to translate to Portuguese the book Real World Haskell. As I did the translation of the text and comments, I started to wonder if I should translate the code as well, as the instructor suggested. For example: data BookInfo = Book Int String [String] deriving Show wou...
I'm thinking about leaving my current employer and wondering how one goes about that process in the programming world. We have a lot of projects on the go at the moment and I'm the only developer. We have 4-5 projects that are fairly big and need to be done in the next few months and even a few longer than that. I'm le...
There are many masters degree programs in computer science online offered by reputable organizations. However, I've found very few bachelors only degree programs offered by non for-profit institutions. I am looking for a degree in computer science and also any programs for entrepreneurship/management or algorithmic tra...
What do you think about using exclamation points in error messages? i.e. "The address is not valid!". Personally, I think it adds nothing, insults the user, and makes the product look like it was written in TRS-80 BASIC by a 12-year-old.
I've inherited a project with a fairly large codebase, and the original developer rarely, if ever, replies to emails. There's a ton of different ways to do some things in it, and I don't know all of them. A lot of duplicated code along these paths (rather than functions included by, say, 5 pages that do relatively the ...
If a software company loses the source code to one of the products they are selling, how serious would that be, in terms you could explain to a layman? Would the term "gross negligence" be too strong? Or "gross incompetence"? Obviously no one got killed but isn't it as serious as some financial negligence that peopl...
I happened to know some system admin and according to him, testing guys are not given preferences in an organization in comparison to developers. No doubt software releases are not possible without testers but I've never laid my hands on testing so not much aware of it. No offense intended.
Suppose I give my developers a screaming fast machine. WPF-based VS2010 loads very quickly. The developer then creates a WPF or WPF/e application that runs fine on his box, but much slower in the real world. This question has two parts... 1) If I give a developer a slower machine, does that mean that the resulting co...
As IT manager what goals would you set for your programmers in your team. These goals would be used in the annual performance review. Any recommendations? How would you create goals that actually measure programmers technical abilities.
I had many bosses, each one had a different approach about allowing or not use of Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, and many other Internet sites. Of course Internet is really needed to research about the best way to solve a specific task. Sometimes you could have a friend online, also a programmer, who knows better ab...
I am very interested in Python for programming on the JVM, and I've worked in Java and Ruby (not JRuby) a lot, and to a certain extent in Groovy. What are the limits to the Java-Jython and Java-JRuby integration right now? What about Groovy: are there any things that a Java class can do that a Groovy class cannot? And ...
Although I've seen many discussions on how to do an interview and develop your brand, I haven't seen many discussions on how to determine if your hiring & interview process is actually working well. I think this question has two parts: How do you know your hiring process is getting the right candidates to apply and g...
We're dealing with an interesting problem on StackOverflow. We've got a whole bunch of little "needs to be done soon-ish" tasks. An example is updating "Related Questions" lists. What we've done in the past is to piggy-back those tasks onto some users' page loads. This was never ideal, but it wasn't really noticeable...
I keep coming across this term hooks in various programming articles. However I don't understand what they are, and how can they be used. So I just wanted to know what is the concept of hooks; if someone could link me to some examples, particularly in the context of web development, it would be great.
How do you correctly or erroneously pronounce programming terms? Any that you find need strict correction or history into the early CS culture? Programming char = "tchar" not care? ! = bang not exclamation? # = pound not hash? Exception #! = shebang * = splat not star? regex = "rej ex" not "regg ex"? sql = "s q l" not...
I'm pretty sure about who, but when? The one with proficient knowledge of programming and software development or the one who's just a beginner in programming? I'm pursuing bachelors right now, when is it preferable for folks like me to read this Must read for programmers book?
I'm not sure if there's an established protocol for this (even if it's not an official one), but thought those most experienced with open source might want to share with us. I'm aware that random patches submitted to open source projects are never paid. They may be indirectly funded by a client but they're never paid ...
I've worked at two companies, who each had a different methodology when it came to code reviews: In the first company, a code review was conducted by the team leaders and was required after the completion of every module. However, in the second company, team leaders weren't required to conduct any code reviews, and jus...
I was asked to make some small technical presentation about specific application scalability. The application is developed using Java, Spring MVC, Hibernate. I have access to the application source code. How can I measure software scalability (using sources) and what metrics do I need to look after when measuring softw...
While travelling I met a mathematician who was sitting near me. In a discussion he said: "...there is nothing like engineering in IT or rather programming". A true engineering is what Architecture is, what Electrical and Mechanical is. It made me think and I was puzzled. A percent of my brain agreed also because in Ind...
In hopes of getting myself and my coworkers to adopt automated unit testing methods in future projects, I would like to see a proper example on how it's done. Simple introductionary lessons to unit testing only cover very basic examples and they don't seem to convince anyone of the benefits unit testing can offer. What...
Following reading the latest CodeProject newsletter, I came across this article on bitwise operations. It makes for interesting reading, and I can certainly see the benefit of checking if an integer is even or odd, but testing if the n-th bit is set? What can possibly be the advantages of this?
A bit of background: I've got a small open source project that I've started on, a basic framework which provides an object oriented means of generating HTML code (since I don't really like HTML, and I do like PHP). It has some released source, and a few downloads, but primarily, the project is for me, with the Open Sou...
I live in Manchester, UK, and while there are lots of developer communities (regular events, get togethers etc) in London, there are not many "up north". I know of a few (NxtGenUg and ManchesterGeekNights) but there must be more than this. What's the best ways of finding out about these? How have people got involved w...
I've been working on a .NET personal project for a little while now and it's almost ready to go open source. I've decided (arbitrarily) to host it on codeplex. Codeplex offers TFS or mercurial. I'm wondering which I should pick. Consider: I've only ever used subversion. I'm using VS 2010 express as my IDE. Tools must...
Some time ago I decided to outsource web development projects (php coding & design). I've opened small office abroad with manager and couple of programmers and designer. I just started but already have a problem controlling their work. Some programmers are fast, others work much slower. I pay them fixed salary, so it m...
I like "red/green/refactor" for RoR, etc. just fine. My day job involves batch processing very large files from third-parties in python and other custom tools. Churn on the attributes of these files is high, so there are a lot of fixes/enhancements applied pretty frequently. Regression testing via a known body of test ...
I am a Software Engineer and over the past few years I have become the de-facto software project manager simply because there isn't one. So to keep our sanity in the R&D/Engineering department, customers have become accustomed to coming to me with their requests. I have no experience in this realm so it is my first tim...
We are working on a large ongoing project that has continual feature changes. These features could take as long as 3 - 4 weeks to complete. This would of course be fine, except the client is always changing its priorities/focus based on pushes from THEIR clients who may want certain features implemented before others. ...
Possible Duplicate: How can I get the word out about a new (open-source) library I've developed? I have hosted my latest project, a JVM-based MIDI processor/API called Mjdj MIDI Morph, on Github (here and here). Now I need to bring some interest to it, even if it's negative interest (so I can improve it). I've looke...
I gave many interviews in the last few years and each time I found the interviewers are not satisfied with what I know. My first company only developed desktop Windows applications using .NET. They had nothing to do with features like: Remoting etc. We also had limited use of Generics, Reflection and Multi-threading. ...
Have you come across a super programmer? What identifies him or her as such, compared to "normal" experienced/great programmers? Also. how do you deal with a person in your team who believes he is a super programmer? Both in case he actually is or if he isn't? Edit: Interesting inputs all round, thanks. A few things ca...
I have graduated this year and got my first job involved with C programming, Linux administration and embedded systems development. I feel quite content with my job, but I'm afraid I won't become a successful programmer in this field. I'm a lone developer on my job now, with my teammates being hardware experts, there i...
When you write wrappers for APIs how do you handle usage errors? Do you assume that the user uses it right and write the wrapper such that it makes the call to the server and let the server return the error? Or do you check for the missing parameters and return an error? If yes, how do you convey the error? a string or...
While looking for a job via agencies some time ago, I kept having questions from the recuitment agents or in the application forms like: How many years of experience do you have in: Oracle ASP.NET J2EE etc etc etc.... At first I answered faithfully... 5yrs, 7yrs, 2 yrs, none, few months etc etc.. Then I thought; I c...
I'm going to be managing projects for a very small (2-5) senior developer team. They develop a subscription based web application. It has been in use for many years so at this point the work involves: Developing new features and updates to existing features Developing in-house tools and reports Fixing bugs Investiga...
I'm trying to decide if I need to reassess my defect-tracking process for my home-grown projects. For the last several years, I really just track defects using TODO tags in the code, and keeping track of them in a specific view (I use Eclipse, which has a decent tagging system). Unfortunately, I'm starting to wonder i...
Does anyone know (or, I guess, I have gut feeling about) how the download size of a software product affects potential users, bandwidth not withstanding? For example: Does a bigger download make them believe that is it more full-featured than it is (like huge .NET Runtimes if deployed with your package)? Reaso...
I'm curious because I notice that the Ultimate subscription costs $12,000... for one year (after that, it's $3,800 to renew). Looking at the subscription chart, you do get quite a bit of software that is normally expensive by itself. Is the package meant for 1 person or is it meant for like a business-type bundle of so...
I want to download Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition to learn all that is new in it. I find it insufficient as there is no Crystal Reports integration in it. Apart from that I want to learn other enterprise features that are bundled with the Professional Edition. If I download the VS 2010 Professional Edition, it is j...
I'm a student of web development languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python. Currently I'm working on some school projects but I'm trying to work on some weekend projects which I can use to showcase for potential employers, what's the best way to set this up? Specifically, are there any tips you have for a new programmer bec...
I have a blog that I use mostly to record solutions to problems I have had, that I had some trouble finding an answer to. Mostly problems where the online doc I googled provided too much info, and I found the answer to my question on the fifth page of my third google hit. (Or if I asked the question here, I either did...
I guess you could call me a "MicroISV" because it's basically just me doing the work to create a product to be sold commercially. I'm sure there are many out there like me, so here's my question: Besides the programming/coding aspect to get your code out the door, do you DIY or vendor-out everything else? For example, ...
It's easy to find resources for learning WPF, similarly it's pretty easy to find resources for F#. But I feel that I could save some time if I could learn them both at the same time. So can anyone recommend any books, blogs, articles , something else? (I'm familiar with functional programming, winforms and c#)
Many people praise Sinatra's ability to create simple projects in a single file. This is great and all but what if I want to use Sinatra for slightly larger project? I'm fairly new to Ruby as a whole but have already found a couple ways to create a Sinatra application with separate models files, partitioning different...
Although not a new idea there seems to have been a big increase in the interest in software craftsmanship over the last couple of years (notably the often recommended book Clean Code's full title is Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship). Personally I see software craftsmanship as good software enginee...
I attended a software craftsmanship event a couple of weeks ago and one of the comments made was "I'm sure we all recognize bad code when we see it" and everyone nodded sagely without further discussion. This sort of thing always worries me as there's that truism that everyone thinks they're an above average driver. Al...
The title pretty much gives you the gist of the question, but allow me elaborate a bit nevertheless. Apart from Google's involvement on Python, and Activestate's on Perl development (Strawberry AFAIK doesn't make any money on its own product) I'm interested in what are the major sources of funding of such. Are there a...
Similar to the question I read on Server Fault, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made in an IT related position. Some examples from friends: I needed to do some work on a production site so I decided to copy over the live database to the beta site. Pretty standard, but when I went to the beta site it was still ...
I work for a company that owns several closed source software. One of our software is used to service clients and generate income so it has commercial value to us (and it pays my salary). I've talked about open sourcing the code, but the option of open sourcing under something like the MIT or GPL or any other open sou...
I am still having a issue getting over a small issue when it comes to TDD. I need a method that will get a certain record set of filtered data from the data layer (linq2SQL). Please note that i am using the linq generated classes from that are generated from the DBML. Now the problem is that i want to write a test for...
I have a subversion server setup that I need to look after several projects, grouped by language, then client (company) and then by project e.g. repos/ flex3 \com1 \project1 \project2 \com2 \project1 \project2 \project3 flex4 \com1 \projectx ...
When my Manager told to team that "from now on successful user stories will be considered for appraisal!" We sat there for while shocked and that was one of the several jaw dropping moments he gave us. We felt that was stupid idea, since this will ruin all concept and goal of agile development methodology. Let me know ...
According SaaS maturity model a SaaS is level 2 if is configurable, but how i can get started in this concept?how patterns and Technics, i can use to enable my SaaS?
I have been hearing about this term for close to 5 years now. I have read about services from Microsoft (Azure), but I have never saw it adopted in the mainstream usage. The thing I am trying to understand is this: What happened to cloud computing? Is the infrastructure at present insufficient to implement this? Is i...
I am looking for a theme with gadgets that will make my life easier as a programmer. Googling from the desktop is one feature I am looking for. Integration with SharePoint or other bug trackers are the second. Any other idea that might make me more productive is a good one.
Let's say you know of an anonymous noobie that wants to be lead upon the path of righteousness. This noobie wants to use some sort of source control tools simply for the experience of using source control tools (and possibly for whatever benefits they bring along with them). To constrain things further (and to make th...
Possible Duplicate: How do you dive into large code bases? I have worked as a developer developing C/C++ applications for mobile platforms (Windows Mobile and Symbian) for about six years. About a year ago, however, I changed job and currently work with large(!) enterprise systems with high security and availability...
What benefits for the developer does the Ruby language have that are not available in C# (preferably with code examples)?
Being a freelancer, I don't have access to corporate training programs where employees learn best practices. Most of the time I am advised to look into the available code on the Internet. Ideal places would be: CodePlex and SourceForge. But this proves to be of limited rather very little help. I want my existing code t...
Here we are in 2010, software engineers with 4 or 5 years or experience, still designing tables with 96 fracking columns. I told him it's gonna be a nightmare. I showed him that we have to use ordinals to interface MySQL with C#. I explained that tables with more columns than rows are a huge smell. Still, I get the "It...
Good afternoon I would like to know how do you guys organize your project folders? I had once a boss that suggest me to organize by Customers. Projects | |----Customer 1 |---- A Cool Solution 1 |---- source |---- version1.0 |---- version1.1 |---- docs ...
When you're coding, do you actively think about your code might be exploited in ways it wasn't originally meant to do and thus gain access to protected information, run commands or something else you wouldn't want your users to do?
My manager has talked with me and says that the quality of my work is excellent, but I need to step up the quantity of how much I crank out. I've only been working for a couple of years, so I still feel like I have a lot to learn. Which route do I take (or is there another?): Quantity: If they want crap, I can give the...
Have you ever encountered a case of code duplication where, upon looking at the lines of code, you couldn't fit a thematic abstraction to it that faithfully describes its role in the logic? And what did you do to address it? It is code duplication, so ideally we need to do some refractoring, like for example making it...
... that is, the inputs and outputs of service functions ? Are entities, or aggregates, allowed to leave service boundaries?
For example, being a beginner, I find a lot of inspiration and direction from reading this post by Bryan Woods.
Since Oracle bought Sun and Apple have decided not to continue developing their JVM, is the "write once and run everywhere" model still relevant or has web services/SOA reduced it to an edge case?
Imagine yourself hired by a new startup backed with few millions coming from venture capitalists. Your mission: organize the development of the next killer app. 25 developers is too much to take care of each individually, so what decision(s) you would make to motivate them? I will appreciate any answers from stock opti...
When your programming you often have to go and look at other pieces of code for reference, search for something etc. I'm looking for some numbers on the ratio of time spend actually typing the code(coding) and the time spend going back and forth between other parts of the system, not even counting browsing the internet...
I have seen this happen multiple times: The candidate likes the company, succeeds at the interview. Then comes to work and at the end of the first day he is sure the codebase/project is not what he would like to spend time with. So he leaves quickly. I think that introducing candidates to the codebase at the interview ...
My first programming language was PHP (gasp). After that I started working with JavaScript. I've recently done work in C#. I've never once looked at low or mid level languages like C. The general consensus in the programming-community-at-large is that "a programmer who hasn't learned something like C, frankly, just c...
I'm on the way of learning Java myself. I find most of texts giving emphasis to Java applets. I got confused about the importance. Is it something widely used? Do I need to spend more time on it?
I just finished college a couple of months ago and I'm taking time out to improve my knowledge. I love programming but I feel like I don't know enough to be confident if I went for an interview. Last night I was browsing through questions and came across a question that asks interviewees how to work out a linked list. ...
In a now deleted question titled "What naming guidelines do you follow?", the author says: Also I prefer to code using hungarian notation from Charles Simonyi. I've run in to several programmers who still prefer to use Hungarian, mostly of the Petzold/Systems Hungarian flavor. Think dwLength = strlen(lpszName). I've...
How do you go about teaching Exception Handling to Programmers. All other things are taught easily - Data Structures, ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, WCF - you name it, everything can be taught easily. With Exception Handling, teaching them try-catch-finally is just the syntactic nature of Exception Handling. What should be ...
"Best practices" are everywhere in our industry. A Google search on "coding best practices" turns up nearly 1.5 million results. The idea seems to bring comfort to many; just follow the instructions, and everything will turn out fine. When I read about a best practice - for example, I just read through several in Cle...
Other than title and pay, what is the difference? What different responsibilities do they have. How knowledgeable/experienced are they? What is the basic measure to determine where a developer fits into this basic structure?
Conundrum: During the course of working on a new feature or fixing a defect, you find a legacy problem in code. What should you do? Fix it and risk altering the behavior of the code. It has either been working up until now by some fluke, or else the defect has not been detected or worth anyone's time to report. Sho...
This question was prompted by a comment left on another question pointing to this article. What Is Clean Code? I was thinking about how that sentiment can be applied to shared resources (servers, etc). What are some of the ways you've found that work to ensure that when others use a shared server they clean up after t...
Often when I'm writing code to do a certain thing, I'm faced with either writing my own or using someone else's code. Assume here that this "thing" is something that I've never done before and am interested in learning how it's done. Which would you say is better from a learning perspective: try writing your own soluti...
It's a fairly common adage that adding more programmers to a late project will make matters worse. Why is this?
I've gotten a bug report from one of my users in a section of the software. The scenario is basically a databinding scenario where the user enters info, and that info is printed to pdf. The problem is, that the functionality: Is used frequently (about 40 times a week) Hasn't been updated/modified in months The area of...
This is in regards to Meta Programming System or MPS by JetBrains. Thus far, from my efforts to learn how to use MPS, I have only learned its basic purpose and that it is very complex. Is MPS worth learning? Is there anyone who already effectively uses MPS to create their own languages and editors for those languages a...
I recently had a programmer in for an interview, who listed Python, PHP, Rails and ASP as a few of their skills. In the interview however, they interviewee didn't enough know what control structures and basic logic were, they had only followed a few demo tutorials. So my question is this: At which point can you add a t...
I have my own thoughts how "ideal" multilingual web application or web site should behave. Can you think of better solution? What are the pros and cons of them? What are cons of the solution I am presenting bellow? Any comments? My "ideal" solution: application should read browser language (from Accept Language header...
This question asked how to auto update version number in VS 2010 : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4025704/publishing-in-net-produces-application-files-myapp-someversionnumber-how-to-ge The answer was, You have to update both Assembly Version AND File version manually Shouldn't the version number increment each ...
I've seen a lot of tests measuring execution speed of programming languages, but I've never found tests measuring development speed. I've heard development speed is increased when working with dynamic languages, but is there any proof of that ? I'm not trying to say dynamic languages aren't efficient, but I'd kind of l...
They both can be seen as centralized processing, but from a developer's perspective is it returning us to the days when access to computers you could program yourself were limited and expensive? To me that was the problem the PC solved. Heard this on http://thisdeveloperslife.com/ 1.0.6 Abstraction.
I'm currently working on the following types of web sites and apps: ecommerce like Amazon Reservation system (think of a hotel receptionist checking rooms availability) Invoice management like Freshbook On Amazon, I didn't notice any breadcrumbs, just facets from the left panel. However, newegg is using both breadcr...
I have a base class Shape, and drived classes Line Segment, Arc, B-spline,... I want to find the intersection point between these shapes. I would like: Shape* a = new LineSegment(); Shape* b = new Arc(); bool did_intersect = a->Intersect(b); I don't like this design in Intersect: bool LineSegment(Shape* s) { Arc* a...
Are there any services that 'for a reasonable price' will give and provide good and technical advice on applications. On a lot of projects, I'm usually the only developer, and sometimes, I think some of my work needs to be improved for efficiency, better MVC interactions, etc. It would be great if there was a professio...
One of the products I developed, is really a niche type application (2 or 3 other competitors in the market). Although for the most part, I'm the lone user of these applications, I'm thinking of selling the app right now. My question is: Because of the small market share and that it's a niche project would you advise ...
I'm looking into Entity Framework for a new project that I'm going to be taking on and as part of my research into it I'm asking some industry professionals if it's stable and ready for 'real world' implementation. In the running is: EF NHibernate DevExpress XPO I already have a great deal of experience with XPO, but...