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Is there a software development process out there newer than agile? I mean, waterfall, then agile, then what?
At the stage of a project right before you actually start putting code in the editor how do you organize the project and your "tasks". Ticketing systems are great but I can't seem to find a way to make them worthwhile on a project until after launch. When tracking bugs and gathering enhancement ideas for later versions...
I'm writing a class that will handle thread synchronisation. It would have a begin method which would increment a counter and an end method that would de-increment a counter. It'll have another method which will block while the counter is not zero, then perform an action while holding the lock. Its a bit like the oppos...
Many times when I get tired of development and my mind doesn't really help me any more (at home), I simply do something entertaining and my mind gets free for more hours of work with higher problem-solving capacity. However, when I recommended this technique to my manager as a technique to increase developers producti...
In a month, I have to hand in a Java project. I have to make an e-shop program which has two types of users (admin and normal users). The admin can add/delete/restock stuff in the shop while the normal user can watch products and buy them. In order to buy a product the customer has to make an account in that e-shop. I'...
I often receive some potential client who wants me to make his web site. Some of them end up as real clients and give the project. Some others (the most) have no idea about prices and times. For those, if they are close to me, I can hear what they want, tell them it is going to be about X money and Y time and it can go...
I am a Junior at workplace and I have been to a number of our retrospectives over the last year. I have been asked to facilitate a retrospective of my own. So far, we have done "hats (red, green, white etc)", "mad, sad, glad", "imagining going forward to end of next sprint, and discussing how it might have gone". I wou...
I make a fair amount of small mistakes when I code (things such as getting an angle bracket to the wrong direction). It adds a fair amount of time to my coding because I have to debug several times and iron out the dinks. Have you got any advice on how to stop these mistakes creeping in?
I have a warehouse management app that I have written that handles batching of orders for batch picking, scanning of items for packing and accuracy. Part of this app is a Dash or control panel that the different managers in the warehouse work out of. It shows who's picking, packing, who's available, how many orders are...
Someone is interested in learning to program. What language paradigm should I recomend him - imperative or declarative? And what programming language should he start with? I think that declarative because it is closer to math. And I would say that Prolog might be the best start because it is based on logic and programs...
Possible Duplicate: TDD negative experience I would like to read about negative experience related to developing in the TDD style. Looks like it is very difficult to find this kind of article since Google is filled by positive views. Are there any good articles that reflect the negatives of TDD?
Rhetoric teaches us that the answer is probably yes. However I feel that we would no longer relate to the vast majority of Agile success stories. I think that my upper management read the benefits column of an Agile process but forgot to read about the requirements or how successful Agile businesses got there.
The licenses I know, including open source and the less restrictive ones like BSD, make it mandatory to: Retain the copyright notice, and/or: Indicate that the precise part of source code was written by the original author. Let's say I want to share source code I've written and I want to grant all rights, including t...
I am developing the UI for a .NET MVC application that will require international localization of all content in the near future. I am very familiar with .NET in general but have never had a project that required such a significant focus on international accessibility. The projected is initially being done in Engli...
I am trying to understand which data format is better on embedded device communicating with Server over REST API. XML or JSON?. Is JSON parsing faster than XML parsing in Java / C and C++? I understand for web client JSON is way to go since java script has inbuilt support for JSON but not sure about embedded device(Ja...
I've been reading a bit about software licenses, and I'm having trouble getting my head around the idea of what happens when one wants to change the license. I've read a couple of questions here on the topic and it clarifies things some, but there are still a couple of areas that are unclear to me. One example: Suppo...
It roughly three weeks I will be taking a Parallel programming class that is taught using C for the assignments. I have a fairly strong interest in the subject at present and my C skills aren't terrible but I feel like I need to brush up on C as the last class I had that actively required programming in it was 8 months...
I began teaching a friend programming just recently (we're using Python), and when we began discussing variable creation and the assignment operator, she asked why the value on the right is assigned to the name on the left, and not vice-versa. I had not thought about it too much before, because it seemed natural to me,...
I'm looking for best practices when creating a plugin for gRaphael. I'm looking for something like jquery where in its documentation you have the best practices of how to write a plugin. So far I haven't found nothing so I'm starting to imagine that it just comes down to best practices with javascript and not with a pa...
Our current method of creating a product release is to tag all of our component repositories with the next appropriate version and then modify a master build script with these new version numbers for each component. The master build script will then be run and it will perform a SCM checkout of each component, then mod...
This happens in Javascript, for example, that division by zero is not handled by the language itself. Is there's a valid reason for this? I see this as a very basic exception that a language should be able to handle (they even handle 0/0 as NaN NaN). or take the square root of a negative number or use arithmetic op...
I have been working on the JVM for years and I have very rarely experienced a JVM crash ... that is until approx 6 months ago. Since that I have experienced approximately 5 JVM crashes resulting from 2 JVM defects. The solution from Oracle was always the same ... upgrade. Each upgrade is always to and from a point r...
1/22/12 update in case you were puzzled as to why I haven't accepted an answer: Pretty much all of the answers make the obvious point that working for him would have been silly, but none of them seemed to answer the question. tl;dr: Some guy I just met says he wants me to join his company. Before he shows me what they ...
Let's say your team is working on 10 features/fixes for a sprint. At the end of the sprint, there are one or two things that the product owner does not accept. But, they would really like the other 8 or 9 to be released. How do you handle this? Using subversion, what would be the best methodology to manage a sprint w...
From "Demystifying Java".. For many of us, the terms information and data are synonymous. However, information and data are distinctly different in programming. Data is the smallest amount of meaningful information. Can someone please give me an example that could help me out, and perhaps relate to a 14 year old? I ...
I just saw a video about what the publishers call the "next major step after the invention of 3D". According to the person speaking in it, they use a huge amount of atoms grouped into clouds instead of polygons, to reach a level of unlimited detail. They tried their best to make the video understandable for persons wit...
I've been thinking recently about being an end-user who wishes to download one of my own projects and use it on a perfectly average machine. Having an equal background in Unix as well as Windows, I know that package management on Unix makes it FAR easier for the programmer to make it easy for the end-user. If a package...
I cannot understand what the following means "ISAPI applications can be written using any language which allows the export of standard C functions, for instance C, C++, Delphi." What is "allowing export of C/C++/Delphi functions" ? P.S. I am very very new.
At the place I currently work they do some thing I consider strange in the way they work with the MySQL datadir. The directory in which the files that actually store the data are kept. $ grep datadir /etc/mysql/my.cnf datadir = /var/lib/mysql Where all the .frm .myd .myi files are found. When moving data around on...
What is a negative side of your TDD experience? Do you find baby steps (the simplest fix to make test green) annoying and useless? Do you find no-value tests (when test has sense initially but in final implementation checks the same logic as other test) maintanence critical? etc. The questions above are about things wh...
Can anyone recommend a good guide to VB.Net for someone having experience/comfortable with C? I can find Python/Java/Lua for C programmers had have used them earlier, but am unable to find anything for C programmers moving to VB.Net (I'll be moving from using C/C++ with gcc/g++ to VB.Net on VS 2010)
Our division is a small offshore development-only unit (not more than 25 members) but we develop many projects. Our main focus is development. Developers are grouped under Project Leaders, and they in turn report to a Project Manager. I'm stuck with the most lamest Project Leader. Our team has 4 developers under this ...
Sometimes you have many entities which have common parts, but also should be addressed uniquely in UI. For example, in a CMS, you have many content types (like news, images, articles, pages, etc.) which have title, URL, SEO settings, etc. in common, but which also have specific fields. For example, image have a path fi...
I was taught in university to write comments for our programs. As I write comments, I feel like I have a better organization and understand the programs better. However, I am in a company where most of the code I encounter doesn't have comments. Why would a programmer not write comments? Are there are any objective rea...
Imagine if your development team were asked to develop a system. The system should only response to some particular user groups such as "Group A", "Group B" or "Boss" who are the actually users of the system. If you receive a phone call from the user saying that the system crash upon some particular situation/parameter...
The debate: Should all development, including refactoring work, be accompanied by a tracking issue? (in our case, Jira) The common ground: Our primary goal is quality. A working product, every release, is more important than anything else. Our codebase is old and automated tests are lacking; we are working on this but ...
I have been given the task to rejuvenate an existing Human Resources application from Access into ASP.NET. This is a strictly internal application, and I have no problems developing it within our standard ASP.NET environment. It does however pose it's own problems, both technically and ethically. The HR app will be res...
I'm reading about LISP. I understand how prefix notation works at a certain level, but I was wondering if there are any tricks to making it intuitive.
I would like to make for example imperative programs as output of Prolog (shaders of graphic card) and also event-driven programs (game logic) ... also I would like to learn how to metaprogram in Prolog in general. I believe there might be some insights or advices how to do it; I don't want to jump into it not prepared...
OK, so, background: I have a little "server" app/module that is written in C++. This is kindof a tunnel application that provides a standardized API via TCP/IP[a] and on the other hand talks to the "real" server via TCP/IP[a] via it's own interface. It doesn't even officially support multiple clients, but due to the i...
I've recently started digging into Atom syndication feeds and are planning to migrate some web services we're running into an more standardized model using Atom Syndication and the Atom Publishing Protocol. The content of most of the syndication feeds are not created by a concrete user though, but rather auto-generated...
I come to you as a newbie programmer who's been working on his own project (which is progressing nicely). My co-founder has also been learning how to program and has reached a point where he could probably start fixing some things and making some things happen. He asked a very good question, which was "how will this wo...
I'm a QA guy and designer and i'm coming to development. How do most developers architect programs? With design I build up with a vague idea of what I have in mind and adapt my design to keep in moving forward and looking good. With coding, I'm trying the same methodology. I'm constantly testing and debugging my code a...
I want to start a bit of freelancing in web development using ASP.NET MVC3 and PHP and I already have some people who are interested in hiring me, but I still can't figure out how much to charge for projects since I have never done it. For example how much would this site cost? Would it cost more if the author built it...
I'm interviewing for a position at an internet startup. The position relates to doing data mining on their very large database of user information. As part of the (long-distance) interview procedure which involves examining a subset of their database, they requested that I submit the code I used for analysis. My main c...
Have you always been fundamentally correct in the software designs you proposed? When you give out some design that was fundamentally wrong, you tend to lose the respect of your fellow team members. No matter what you do after that you end up being crosschecked for everything thing you propose after that incident. This...
The proponents of functional programming languages assert that functional programming makes it easier to reason about code. Those in favor of statically typed languages say that their compilers catch enough errors to make up for the additional complexity of type systems. But everything I read on these topics is based o...
We are investing heavily in Java, but after recent experiences and reading Joonas' response on that question: Had you used those flags in Java 6, you could have experienced not only crashes, but incorrect execution of loops, that is, miscalculations, because of a minor upgrade from 6u19 to 6u20 (approximately...
Possible Duplicate: How do you interview someone with more experience than you? Next week i'll be interviewing some contractors for a 6-month senior Dev position on a project. I'm an OK programmer myself, but nothing special, and at the moment i'm struggling to think of what questions to ask them, or what coding cha...
While I understand what the final keyword is used for in the context of classes and methods as well as the intent of its use for in regards to variables; however, the project I just started working on seems to have an excessive number of them and I'm curious as to the logic behind it. The following snippet of code is j...
I just banged my head against the table for some 20 minutes looking at a totally weird bug in PHP, and then I realized there's octal. The <%(*&#> octal. In short, I padded some literals with zeros so the code would be aligned, I know, big mistake. Forgot about octals. The question is, does anyone use octals for anyth...
Because of a change in technologies, we are doing a major version change in our in-house enterprise software. I am going to be doing the usual of interviews, observations and brainstorming sessions. What general (and fun!) questions do you recommend/use in a first pass to elicit the discovery or remembrance of new func...
What methods (in programming/web dev terms) were used to take payments online before such things as Paypal, Google Checkout and various gateways and API's. How were such transactions carried out?
I am wondering if I should rely on Visual Studio in adding HTML and CSS elments by using the viusal toolbars or should I write them by myself? Is it considered bad practice if I relied on Visual Studio to do that?
So I have a client that is running multiple versions of multiple browsers. I currently support IE7, IE8, IE9, Firefox4/5, Safari 5 and Chrome. The site works in all the named browsers. IE has a feature called 'compatibility mode', the current bane of my existence. The problem is that in compatibility mode, form butt...
I'm a software dev team leader (I recently took control of a new team), and ultimately responsible for maintaining high productivity, good quality and organized priorities. I have 6 senior developers in my team, but things feel like a mess here. The situation is that I have to deal with JIRA requests from about 10 diff...
I think the short answer to this question is probably "yes", but I thought I'd ask anyway! We are in the process of taking a number of existing similar-but-different applications and, as part of what is for us possibly the largest development project ever, attempting to replace them and any subsequent similar-but-diffe...
I'm developing a game with a component-based architecture. I want to store entity descriptions in a SQLite database for compactness and convenience. Obviously the backend code is (and the database schema will be) under version control. Since important behaviour is in the database, and because multiple people will be wo...
Suppose someone writes some code, and publishes it as open source under the GPL. Later they decide to close source their application and put it for sale. Is that in violation of the GPL? All code in the closed source app was written by the said author. Since he "owns" the code, I would think he can choose to re-license...
It is clearer how to interview someone experienced in Java / C++ or other languages closer to C#. In these cases the language and specific technologies are less important; what matters are the OOP principles. But how to do it with someone that comes from Progress to .NET and also, me as an interviewer, not knowing Prog...
Dividing a problem to smaller ones until the individual problems can be solved independently and then combining them to answer the original question is known as the divide and conquer algorithm design technique. [See: Introduction to Algorithms by CLR] Recently, this approach to solve computational problems especially ...
I understand the concept of CSS. But on many projects I've found that I tend to lose myself and end up with a millions CSS files for a millions different pages! I realise that the point of CSS is that it cascades. Otherwise it would just be a style sheet! I would just like people to shed some light on how they use CSS ...
When I was assigned a program, I usually build them block by block. For example, I was required to write a program which enable FTP transfer of files, which also allow queueing of transfer and a multi-thread transfer instead of single thread transfer. What I would do is: 1) Try to make the program able to transfer 1 fi...
In a new winform app that I am still preparing, I got the idea that I could by sponsored or have some kind of logos of companies that want to place they logos there. The application is for sports training and completion management, carrier management, etc. As any one seen something like this? How can it be done? How c...
I am computer engineering student. I've been thinking about how I can handle a big project. What should be my first step to reach my goal in a more efficient and effective way? When I come up with a project, I don't know how I should start working on it. Many times, I just ignore it. However, I don't want to ignore my ...
Given the following scenario: There is a public website (with about 50-100 visitors a day) Visitors register for the services offered by the company who owns the website Visitors tend to give wrong information regarding address and phone number that slows down the process of their registration, therefore their transac...
I look for a tool or a "best practice" whose focus is on managing how the current staff of programmers can get assigned and re-assigned to different projects depending on changing priorities. Progress on projects should be tracked, too. Our department is not faced with a single, overly complex project (for which I'd kn...
I use .Net and C#. I have the following code in some module: DateTime validFrom = Convert.ToDateTime(validFromTxt.Text); This makes (in my opinion) the implicit assumptions that there is text in validFromTxt.Text that it is possible to convert this into type DateTime. My question is, may the module make these implic...
I would like to ask you as experts about PHP, ASP.NET/C#, Python or any other server side language. How do they span multiple servers? When I see a big website and look how many dedicated servers it uses, at least it uses 10 servers. I sit and think how the langauge that was used in building this site span these server...
In short I am searching for an alternative to Java applets for making some interactive parts like minigames etc. on my website Facts: I´m developing an e-learning website for children. This site has following main functions: practice part where children can do grammar test and receive points for good answers. tamagot...
In Java, C# and many other strongly-typed, statically checked languages, we are used to write code like this: public void m1() { ... } protected void m2() { ... } private void m2() { ... } void m2() { ... } Some dynamically checked languages don't provide keywords to express the level of "privateness" of a given class...
What exactly are different things we need to take care when writing different JS files, like arrays, variables etc., Is there a book or website explaining differences between different JS engines used for browsers? I was working on something in our application and bumped into a JS issue and was looking for solution and...
I have sat on interviews and noticed a big disparity between individuals of similar competency at answering questions on a whiteboard during an interview. Generally, being able to clearly explain your thinking, writing readable code with the dry eraser pen, avoiding long moments of silence tended to result in more fav...
I'm coming from the iOS side. I'm particularly interested in knowing if there are similar hurdles on the Android side on these points: developer fee -- do you have to pay $99 a year to build for android? provisioning devices - do you have to go through a complex provisioning/digital certificate/device-id routine to ge...
My company posted a job listing to get me a helper. A recruiter called me today and all he kept saying was "MVC this Entity Framework that..." - He sounded shocked when I said the project uses DataSets and Linq2Sql over WinForms and ASP.NET WebForms. Then I was looking at options for automated website testing and I co...
Possible Duplicate: How do you dive into large code bases? I've been in this situation before and I kind of just poke around the code while really surfing the internet. I care about this job though, and I want to excel. What kinds of things should I look for? How should I go about starting to learn the framework? In...
I'm thinking of selling a collection of Django apps I've written which provide the basic functionality of a Facebook game, but I'm also thinking of releasing it under a GNU Affero GPL. I read the Affero GPL, and the extra clause specified that modified versions of a covered work have to be distributed under the same li...
I understand why you can't develop OS X apps on a Linux computer, but is there a good technical reason why you can't develop iPhone and iPad apps on Linux? Why isn't it possible to compile iOS source code into an iOS executable and run it in an iOS simulator on Linux or install it on a development iOS device? Is it ju...
Some co-workers and myself are tasked with a "rewrite" of an ancient, unmaintainable application and to shape it into something workable. I am setting up a continuous integration server, and since we are developing for .NET, I think I will use CruiseControl.net The software being built will have a large amount of build...
I've been working on a nightmare of a project for some months now. The product is a small Ruby on Rails app/website for internal use by a small group of people. I'm coming up to the finish line and I'd like the actual beta release to go smoothly. I still have a number of small bugs that affect functionality in a minor ...
Programming is a highly cerebral job, and one of the biggest problems I have is bringing my work home with me. It's so easy to do: whenever I get the chance to think, my mind naturally wanders to work-related matters. I find so many of the other things in my day rather mentally unstimulating and as they say, nature abh...
I'm working on a project that generates a series of quadratic bezier curves and connects them together, maintaining slope from the end of one segment to the beginning of the next to make the transition smooth. The problem is that while the path is smooth, it tends to go off screen frequently. The way this is done curre...
Possible Duplicate: Where do you find the time? I am sure there are lots of us in this very common situation. You have a job that's demanding. In other words you need to put in 50+ hours/week and yet you are expected to keep up with what's happening on the bleeding edge technology and open source end. Any suggestion...
When you have a short deadline to being with, and you're nearing the end of development, would you rather rush through coding to dedicate more time to QAing or keep your pace and possible have VERY little QA time? I am a sole developer on this project and I am the sole QAer as well. It is an extremely short time perio...
Ok I have run into this many times, but here is the worse case scenario slightly exaggerated. A client says "hey can you make us this small module to do this small task"? Me: "Sure no problem". So based on budgets and constraints etc., I skip some of the architecting and dive right in and make it no sweat. Then they as...
Consider two UI designers who want to design "user attractive" designs. "User attraction" is a concept that is not objective and only resides in the mind of designers. Thus designer A could for example pick up red color, while designer B picks blue. Designer A create a layout which is entirely different from designer B...
I really like a microframework in Python called Flask. I have used it for the past 2 months, and I find it excellent. Now, I would like to use it in deployment, but, there are a few things I'm afraid of. Firstly, even though its a microframework, it depends on Werkzeug (a WSGI framework type of thing), which, in case I...
In my understanding a major point in Continuous Deployment is (well, obviously I guess) that deployment is automatically done as a part of the building process. Conceptually it is easy to understand how the deployment can be done when the target is a website. However it appears hard/impossible to continuously deploy w...
Possible Duplicate: When and why you should use void (instead of i.e. bool/int) What is the reasoning behind making all functions (and methods!) return a uniform type, usually int, as a status? To me it feels odd; especially when you're calling a getter and it returns a status (which is usually the same always) and...
...As this forces us to create getters and setters, which in practice are often totally extraneous? Is there any good language-design reason why interfaces in most (all?) languages do not allow member fields to help fulfill the interface spec? In most extant languages, members are treated fundamentally differently from...
Someone suggested me to mark classes as SEALED that are not being inherited anywhere. I was using default style and was not concerned with the type of class. At present I don't have a benchmark tool to study the performance gains but read somewhere that Sealed Classes give performance benefits. Is this performance issu...
I'm building a website fro a client which uses TinyMCE as the main WYSIWYG editor. Now my client asked if it is possible to write a line and make a line break and then continue without leaving a space between the text before and after the line break (e.g. just like in word). I told him that the web uses paragraph for...
PHP's deployment model is uber simple: upload and run. This is especially ideal for web applications that are intended to be installed on shared hosting by end users (think: Wordpress). Compare this with the installation of a popular Perl app. I want to stop writing things in PHP, but want to keep the same deployment m...
The next version of the application will be a .NET based application (both desktop and web). The requirement is that both applications have to look and work exactly the same way. I was thinking that maybe there was a way to create a web control or something and use it in both applications. Is this possible? For exa...
I am a final year undergraduate student of Information Technology. My team and I have taken up "Sign Language Recognition" as our Final Year Project. We have just started with it and we are in the phase of information gathering (gathering data). We plan to use Instrumented Gloves as the input device. But we do not have...
I'm building a component that manages available resources (JavaScript and CSS files) for a web page. As controls are added to the page, they register and un-register their requirements with this manager. Then at render time the manager only renders <script> and <link> tags for the required resources. A basic implementa...
I've been reading and watching videos on MVVM and Silverlight.. I'm pretty new to Silverlight but not new to .NET. Interesting that I used MVVM in my WPF apps without knowing that it's MVVM. I was creating easily-bindable classes to serve as a layer between data and XAML :) Project that we start will be done with Silve...
Programmers.SE has plenty of questions of beginner programmers asking if they must use a specific language or another one in their daily work, or if they must learn a language or another. Those questions are quickly closed, and when they receive answers, those answers are of type: Use what is best for a specific proje...
So, I am here at assembly 2011 and there was this demo played: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Xjc7eklxE&feature=player_embedded It's one single file only, it says that in the rules. So I repeat, how have they made this to fit into so small file?
So, I'm planning to write a C++ library and I want it to be cross-platform, and as this library won't deal with UI and I want it to have as little dependencies as possible, I won't be using Qt (actually Qt won't really help me to achieve what I want, all I plan on using is STL and Boost). Now when it comes to build a c...