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We write a complete functional specification for our development team of two. We do not have professional testers however we have drafted in the help of our available helpdesk personnel to perform 'QA testing'. We have had problems in the past where complete chunks of functionality do not work, or the code is delivere...
I was curious if the recruitment team at high-demand companies such as Google takes a lack of hobby projects into consideration when evaluating candidates. I'm a straight 40 hour/week programmer, who is lucky to spend an hour or two a month outside of work on anything programming related. I love hanging out on SO/SE du...
In the past 2 years since I started writing business applications (before I did either high level front end or very low level systems programming), learned datasets, linq to sql, and now entity framework. The logical thing to look at next seems to be NHibernate. Reasons I eventually ended up at EF are: (1) it has the ...
Can anyone point me to any GOOD open source .NET parental web content filters? I would like to gain an understanding of how I can filter/block web traffic based on Url and/or keyword. I've looked on google but can't seem to find any developed c#
Here's the type of situation that I've been struggling with, and I'm certainly not the first: Project has a budget based on the estimated time to develop the solution Deadline to turn project over to the PM for QA is one some date I am working on multiple projects at once, and each has a budgeted number of hours and d...
I'm designing a distro and some of the software packages included are maintained in such a way that my source repository doesn't actually include the source code, but they are included as an svn:externals property or a list of read-only repository URLs and are checked into the source tree before building. Sometimes, th...
Version control for ladder logic (LL) programs for programmable logic controllers (PLCs) seems to be virtually non-existent. It may be because LL is a visual language and tends to be stored in binary files, or it may be because source code control hasn't "caught on" in process control engineering circles - or perhaps m...
I like to backup things every night or say every week. I'm sure there's a more efficient way than emailing the solution folder and database files to myself! I don't have team foundation or any commercial products like that. I'm looking for a freeware.
We're a scrum team of 3 developers, 1 designer, the scrum master, and the product owner. However, we don't have official tester in our team. A problem that is always with us, is that, testing the application and passing those tests and removing bugs has been defined as one of the criteria to consider a PBI (Product Bac...
I recently developed an application for an organization (and I'm not charging them). I want to maintain total ownership of the source code and there are various Open Source Project that I've used. I want/need to comply by the rules of the licenses that they use and still keep the project within a few guidelines: If ...
I wonder what the technical implementation differences between C# and Scala are and how both solutions compare to the implementation ideas and concerns voiced in the email Peek Past lambda by Brian Goetz, sent to the mailing list of Project Lambda (JSR 335)? From the email: We explored the road of "maybe lambdas shoul...
Recently an item has been added to the Product Backlog by product owner which says "When I go to login page from x page, I see an error. I want that error to be removed". It seems to me that this is not a use case, and shouldn't be a PBI (Product Backlog Item). However, when I discussed it, scrum master told me that us...
I want to know what is more standard way to call regular expression in short way. I have seen both, regex and regexp. Google says regex has almost 2 as much hits that regexp, but it depends on way I search it (when I add "regular expression" after the word, "regex" becomes "regex regular expression", the result is diff...
I am currently investigating multi tier architecture design for a web based application in MVC3. I already have an architecture but not sure if its the best I can do in terms of extendability and performance. The current architecure has following components DataTier (Contains EF POCO objects) DomainModel (Contains Dom...
Are custom DSLs in JavaScript still viable, Specifically ones written with Antler, Boo, or the former Microsoft Oslo? With the proliferation of open source JavaScript/ECMAScript engines (V8, IronJS, etc.), does it make more sense to write the functionality needed into one of those instead of writing an entirely new lan...
Currently, I am reading Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# and in it, two ways of creating a web application are described: Website Web Application Project In which scenarios should I choose the former over the latter, and vice versa?
I have a 10K LOC project written in Django with quite a deal of Celery (RabbitMQ) for asynchronicity and background jobs where needed, and have come to the conclusion that parts of the system would benefit from being rewritten in something other than Django for better concurrency. Reasons include: Signals handling and...
When Facebook, Youtube, and even Microsoft themselves say that they've "dropped support for IE6", what do they really mean? Youtube still functionally works fine in IE6. If they mean that they've dropped support for visual appearance and fancy features, then their point is moot. Web developers have degraded IE6's appe...
first my apologies if this isn't the right place for this question but I think that th.CS is not the right place for sure neither is StackOverflow. I really like functional programming and I think I'm a medium level guy in F# and understand the basic concepts of Haskell rather well - and yes I think I know/fell like I ...
The common styles of pseudocode are largely intelligible, and it is more or less clear how to write pseudocode for sequential programs. But if parallelism is not hidden behind a full library and is regarded as a regular part of programming, then it should be treated as the same way in regards to pseudo-code. Is there ...
I've heard stories of this from senior coders and I've seen some of it myself. It seems that there are more than a few instances of programmers writing pointless code. I will see things like: Method or function calls that do nothing of value. Redundant checks done in a separate class file, object or method. if statem...
A business has five discrete streams of business requirements to be implemented in software. There is a team of ten developers. A "naiive" organisational solution is to split the team into five "teams" of two (one per requirements stream). But I feel this compromises the integrity of the team (making teamwork more dif...
TDD gurus more and more tell us that TDD is not about tests, it is about design. So I know some developers who create really great design without TDD. Should they practice TDD then?
A business has five requirements streams, with a "stream leader" (called Product Manager, but this is an in-house term) per-stream and a backlog per-stream. If we wanted to follow Scrum more closely, as I understand it, best practise would dictate the identification of a single product owner managing a single backlog c...
I'm 21 years old and a first year master's computer science student. Whether or not to continue with my PhD has been plaguing me for the past few months. I can't stop thinking about it and am extremely torn on the issue. I have read http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html and many, many other masters vs phd articles o...
I am planning on opening sourcing a project that I've been working on for a while and that I think would benefit the community. I've already cleaned up the code, added a reasonable license, and wrote a packaging script for it that runs the unit tests, etc (it's Python, so that means setup.py). I wrote a README that des...
One of the things I struggle with is not using Hungarian notation. I don't want to have to go to the variable definition just to see what type it is. When a project gets extensive, it's nice to be able to look at a variable prefixed by 'bool' and know that it's looking for true/false instead of a 0/1 value. I also do...
Some time ago I wrote a BlackBerry application. I find that I now want to release it under an open source license. I am strongly considering the GPL v3 license. All the code is mine; there are no third-party libraries (with the exception, of course, of the all the standard BlackBerry/Java libraries that I am "linked" t...
We have a project that everyone says we will be doing in a agile way but I doubt we have clearly understood what agile is. In previous projects we had planning meetings, then defined the product back log and allocated the work to developers in 2 to 3 week sprints. Every morning we had scrum meetings (which seemed to go...
We are planning a new project and we want to go with a services oriented architecture. Everyone agrees that this is the way to go but how does this fit in with starting the development using agile methodologies? I do not have any experience with SOA, although I have some experience with TDD (test driven development). T...
When managing an open source project (using a service like GitHub) how would one respond to the following: Somebody has kindly submitted a patch to add a new feature or address a problem. Any one of the following situations occur: The source code doesn't meet one or more naming conventions, etc. I feel that the source...
I desire to become a more serious scientific C++ programmer. To do so, I need a consistent style of workflow (e.g., coding, test-driven development, etc.). My question is simply what sort of workflow should I consider? I am familiar with Linux and Mac, and prefer to use free tools like cppcheck, valgrind, g++, etc....
I think everyone will agree that the following boolean variable/property names are standard: UserIsAdmin OrdersAreClosed The important thing to note about boolean expressions is that they are stated and then evaluated as true or false. User is admin. False. You get the point. However, lately I have seen an increas...
Is this agile? Scrum? Any suggestions on how this can be made more agile under the circumstances? Which points are positives and which can be improved? The product is developed for a customer who will re-sell it while paying us royalty. The team does not get to talk directly to the end user. Only to the reseller. ...
What is the general workflow when I want to add a feature to an open source application I didn't originally write? How do I get to know the code? How do I find the spot that needs to be changed or added? How do I actually make the change without breaking anything else? How do I test that everything is still working? Wh...
How can I take a truth table and turn it into a compacted if block? For instance, let's say I have this truth table where A and B are conditions and x, y and z are possible actions: A B | x y z ------------- 0 0 | 0 0 1 0 1 | 0 0 1 1 0 | 0 1 0 1 1 | 1 0 0 This could transform into below if block: if(A) { if(B) ...
Are there scenarios where polling for events would be better than using the observer pattern? I have a fear of using polling and would only start using it if someone gave me a good scenario. All I can think of is how the observer pattern is better than polling. Conside this scenario: You are programming a car simulato...
I'm planning on running an executable as a child process in my program (e.g. using Ruby's popen or C's exec() family of functions). However, the executable I'm planning on running is licensed through the GPL. The GPL, as I understand it, requires that all linked code to GPL licensed code needs to also be GPL. But there...
I've been working on some piece of software while being "employed" by company A. I now want to continue working on the same software while being employed by company B. Company B wants the software to become open-source to prevent any future legal issues between company A and them. I will consult company A's lawyer to m...
I've been the lonely programmer in my work for quite a long time. Usually I've read articles and posts about Version Control Systems Continuous Integration/Delivery Development methodologies: Scrum, Waterfall, V-Model, Agile, XP, etc. Software Project Management But almost all of them seem to be focused on TEAMS. I'm...
For several reasons during development I sometimes comment out code. As I am chaotic and sometimes in a hurry, some of these make it to source control. I also use comments to clarify blocks of code. For instance: MyClass MyFunction() { (...) // return null; // TODO: dummy for now return obj; } Even thoug...
I don't really know the nomenclature regarding these matters, but here is a brief description of what I want. Please let me know if I should substantiate more. So I have this larger project involving databases, different languages, and interfaces (SQL, R, C, Python, both GUI & CLI). It's growing a little too big to fit...
There's a bug in my program. Doesn't really matter what the platform is. Every so often, a row in a ListView is the wrong color. I tried setting a watchpoint for the variable that is supposed to dictate the color of the row, and it doesn't change... I am guessing it means the problem could be in the framework code. I'v...
I'm a junior developer and I find it hard to estimate how much time it takes to finish a bigger software project. I know how to structure the architecture in general, but it's hard for me to know what details I have to do and what problems I have to solve. So it's hard to estimate how much time it will take to finish a...
I saw on a article that put forth this statement: Developers love to optimize code and with good reason. It is so satisfying and fun. But knowing when to optimize is far more important. Unfortunately, developers generally have horrible intuition about where the performance problems in an application will actuall...
I had asked this question on Stackoverflow, and before it got booed off, I received the helpful suggestion from Péter Török that this might be a better place to post it. I've been programming in Java for a few years. I've often discussed design decisions with colleagues on the basis of what constitutes 'good style'. In...
I'm looking for an existing library license which satisfies the following conditions: GPL-compatible Can be statically linked with closed-source programs Binary modifications of the library, including cases where the library is statically linked with another project, must be accompanied by the library source code Lic...
I have a written a small app as a research project that uses open source libraries. It can do packet sniffing, network scanning and man in the middle attacks on wifi and lan. This software is intended to be used for security auditing. But users can also use it to circumvent the MAC filtering of their ISP and get free i...
As I know, softwares licensed under the GNU GPL is totally free and not allowed for sale. However, today I found this program called Minitube and it is sold even though it is licensed under GPLv3. Does the original author has a permission to sell his own software, even if he releases it under the GPLv3?
I have just recently completed my first open source project and while it is mostly a tool I still want to release it as open source considering it is C# so if someone wanted to they could decompile it. Also, I'm not looking to sell it. I was researching licensing but the wording is a bit over my head. Mostly I'm just l...
in JavaScript: function getTopCustomersOfTheYear(howManyCustomers, whichYear) { // Some code here. } getTopCustomersOfTheYear(50, 2010); in C#: public List<Customer> GetTopCustomersOfTheYear(int howManyCustomers, int whichYear) { // Some code here } List<Customer> customers = GetTopCustomersOfTheYear(50, 2010)...
In Java, most people expect that each call to Iterator.next() will return a distinct object. This has led some of us to define an alternative model which we called a 'cursor'. (Note that others use the term 'cursor' to draw a different distinction.) The pattern of a cursor is: class SomeCursor { boolean hasNext();...
There are lots of books on assembly. However, they usually deal with ISAs about which I don't care, such as MIPS or ARM. I don't deal with these architectures; there's no reason for me to try to learn them. But x86 assembly books seem... nonexistent. Let's say for example I'm trying to build a toy compiler generating W...
When writing applications for software, specifically mobile devices, will there be a problem with using any specific type of fonts (copyright/patent issues)? If so, how can we avoid this possible problems? Will it then make a difference if the app was a paid version or a free version?
I'm using a code sample from MSDN in my project. Accompanying the sample is this license: http://pastebin.com/K46NYf69 I've modified the code sample slightly to better suit my needs and I now want to release my program as open source. However, I'm not sure which licenses are compatible with this license because I canno...
I've been doing a Requirements Analysis module in my university. We've covered all kinds of formal requirements stuff, like UML, Use Case Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams and Contracts. I have to ask- are any of these things of any value whatsoever in the real world? The only Use Case Diagrams I've ever seen could be summed...
I tried creating a flow chart of a function that I use in my program, but there are a lot of conditional statements in between every process and the diagrams are getting more confusing. Is there a another language or markup other than flow charts that can be employed for large codebases with high complexity?
At my place of employment, we've had some serious growing pains. We went from a development team of 3 to 10, and the company itself has grow 30% in the past year. By most measurements, we're doing well. Unfortunately, the quality of our software has suffered. In a meeting today with my division's manager, I proposed...
I'm a Python programmer that prefers to develop on Windows but still end up deploying to a Linux server. I've just finished writing a little script: stuff that downloads files from a site, generates a sitemap, gzip it, pings the search engines and emails the response code. Nowadays most GNU tools are available and comp...
I'm a reasonably experienced programmer trying to learn web developement. I'm trying to develop a client-side web application which uses svg or canvas for graphics. I've decided I'd like to write the application code in Coffeescript. I don't know either Javascript or Coffeescript. How necessary knowing Javascript to...
Here's the scenario: a client of mine (lets call them Company A) had a website built by someone else (let's call them Company B). They then asked me (Company C) to configure a third party framework to look and feel exactly the same as what Company B built for them. Would it be legitimate for me to use content (inclu...
The version of python which I am using is 2.6, and there is a 2.7 and 3.x. Usually I use python for some trivial program/snippet. I realize there are some major difference between 2.x and 3.x. I would really like to know, if I am going to make a bigger project with python, which version of python should I use? Should I...
Short Question Does it fly in the face of the Pythonic view to reuse / repurpose python modules for projects out side of their intent? Background Over the past several months I have been working on a project that uses the Python unittest module to run manual system tests. Please see questions 1 2 and 3 for greater d...
Does the desktop browser version of a web site always suffice for the tablet version(assuming no flash)? or is it common for websites to have a special tablet version that is different from both desktop and phone?
A software development company I work with has a web based product they are successfully selling to clients. All of these clients have a support agreement with us that generally requires us to access their servers, databases and application data. As the number of clients grows, (and the number of different people suppo...
I'm working on a medium sized (100k lines) code base, it's all relatively recent code (less than a year old) and has good unit test coverage. I keep coming across methods which are either no longer used anywhere or only referenced in unit tests which only test that specific method. Should I remove this code if I'm cert...
Some languages, for exemple java, introduced a low pause GC. Those GC can do most of the work without pausing the whole world. This is obviously a quite hard problem because it require to analyze the memory when thread are modifying it, resulting in data that can be used in the begining of the process and not anymore w...
Ideally, we would have different browsers supporting the same standards and same code producing the same result on all browsers. That hasn't happened yet. What are the reasons why?
Which of these styles do people prefer? string mystring = "defaultvalue"; if (condition) mystring = "othervalue"; VS string mystring = null; if (condtion) mystring = "othervalue"; else mystring = "defaultvalue"; VS mystring = condition? "othervalue" : "defaultvalue";
Is it possible to define variables dynamically? Last night I was writing some code (C and VB2010) and I ran into a problem related to defining variables in my program. The variables needed depend on the number of entries added by the user and the number of users. Even using dynamic memory allocation we have a size lim...
My friend and I are planning to develop a tiny and simple CMS by taking some inspirations from an already existing GNU GPL CMS. We take the ideas and try to develop it as simply we can, is it possible ? We are planning to set up the same licence, GNU GPL. Is it a good choice ? Which are the conditions to do it ?
Possible Duplicate: Why to let / not let developers test their own work Developers develop the code and software. Ya that means they know very well of what they have done. But why there is always a separate department in IT companies called as Testing department? (Mainly for testing developers outcome) Why a develop...
Possible Duplicate: What would you consider best practice workflow tools for web application (PHP) development? I start my new job next week as a PHP Developer which is my dream job but it's going to be object-orientated which I've only done in Java whilst at university. My question is regarding PHP tools - what are...
Can anyone tell me how some css3 code (transitions/transformations) get hardware accelerated? In other words, what actually happens when the browser sees css3, what is the pipeline/process involved?
I am looking to query the main Google search however all references including stackoveflow point to the Google AJAX Search API. The odd thing is that it does not seem to exist any more not even a note to say it is depreciated? The old links point to main Google code site. If I look at the list of API's on that site th...
How is Visual Studio Lightswitch different from regular Visual Studio? In what sort of situations would you use this IDE over regular Visual Studio? I'm trying to decide if this is something that would be worthwhile for me to take the time learning since I am currently doing WPF/Silverlight development.
I'm getting a little annoyed of having to wrap primitive types in wrapper objects to store them in collection data structures (sets, maps, lists, etc.) in languages like Java and Objective C. I'd really like to have, say, a Map data structure that works the same way whether I'm mapping NSNumbers to Strings or integers ...
With dynamic scoping, a callee can access the variables of its caller. Pseudo C code: void foo() { print(x); } void bar() { int x = 42; foo(); } Since I have never programmed in a language that supports dynamic scoping, I wonder what some real world use cases for dynamic scoping would be.
I am part of a small software company that specializes in small to medium-sized business applications and my experience with distributed architectures/SOA is limited. Please let me know if I'm going about this all wrong. We often start development on small business applications, where a distributed architecture seems l...
Very commonly we have feature requests for fields that only one customer wants. This, at best, clutters the application's code. Often when we look in their database a few months after adding the fields, we can see that they are not actually even using the extra fields. Also, it's quite an old application so adding a si...
Say you've spent a significant amount of time (5 years) serially starting up companies, with enough success to keep going for 5 years, but not enough to retire rich. And now, with a mortgage and a serious relationship, burned out, you're trying to dust off your resume and get a regular, 9-5 job. How would you record/re...
I'm passionate about data mining, I have read some books like Programming Collective Intelligence, and I would like to know more good books, specially practical ones, about data mining in conjunction with AI. Any tips will be appreciated as well. Thanks.
I'm writing a Rails cookbook app as a learning exercise. I've created a table for Recipes which holds info for the recipe (name, author, etc...). I also have a table for Ingredients which will be a master ingredients list, and then a table in-between which holds info specific to that recipe/ingredient combo (for exampl...
Given that you have two identical methods (signatures, body, input/output) that you wanted to refactor into just one, what type of Work Item from the MS Agile template would be most appropriate? Task, Bug, Quality of Service, Risk? Why?
Quite simple, why would I want to write code that works for all cases and scalable data when all I need to do is repeat the same process a few times with a few minor tweaks? I'm unlikely to need to edit this again any time soon. It looks like a lot of less work to just go... function doStuff1(){/*.a.*/} function doStu...
I am an Electrical Engineering undergrad. I've reading many technical papers about Signal and Image processing algorithms (reconstruction, segmentation, filtering, etc). Most of the algorithms shown in these papers are defined over continuous time and continuous frequency, and often give the solutions in terms of compl...
I am working on a software project that is intended to replace the data entry done in Excel spreadsheets. We have a grid control that displays the data but it is edited in a form with tabs for different sections (over 60 columns in the spreadsheet). The users are complaining that it takes them longer with the tabbed f...
I'm starting with SCRUM and I have a problem understanding one thing. How does SCRUM handle backlog items that take longer than one sprint?
If yes, what precautions should I take?
As a team lead, how can you help your programmers to grow? The reason I ask this is because there are a few programmers working with me, and I really want to "turn them on the loose", to realize their maximum potential, and to keep them happy. But I don't quite know how to do this, do I have to Interact with them fre...
Possible Duplicates: How do managers know if a person is a good or a bad programmer? How to recognize a good programmer? For your record, I am a programmer myself, and I still do coding. We are not doing your-just-another-CRUD-app, instead we are working on CAD apps. The nature of software development makes it real...
I'm wondering what others use as a tool for creating the final package to hand over to the customer. For now, these are the tasks it should perform for our company: build a set of VS projects (C#,C++); which set depends on configuration on commandline of preferrably in a file copy some of the outputs (dll,exe) and hea...
I have been looking around for a book on designing and developing custom interfaces for iOS but I don't seem to be able to find any books on this topic and I was wondering if anyone here knew of any books on the design and development of custom iOS interfaces and applications. Also, I am not aware of any other questio...
Since I am developing iOS apps I'm trying to find stats on how many iOS devices there are out there. Preferably broken down into versions: Iphone 3G, Iphone 3Gs, Iphone 4 etc. Also I'd like to know the stats on different iOS versions. After an hour of googling I found out that it is not the easiest thing to find. Anyon...
I've been at my first job for about 2 months and I've started to notice that there is a delicate balance between workload and helping new-hires. Since there is a lot of pressure from management to fix bugs and resolve as many customer issues as possible everyone on the team seems to be very focused on their backlog of ...
As I get deeper into the area of ASP.NET MVC 3, I feel like I'm finding a lot of very nice technical nuggets as well as new ways of doing things versus classic ASP.NET. One of those "nuggets" is custom action filters. You can simply decorate your controller classes or methods with attributes that, by convention, poin...
I used to use Windows, SVN, Tortoise SVN, and Beyond Compare. It was a great combination for doing code reviews. Now I use OSX and Git. I've managed to kludge together a bash script along with Gitx and DiffMerge to come up with a barely acceptable solution. I've muddled along with this setup, and similar ones, for ov...
In a software startup, how can we deal with the main developers/programmers of the company who are good at design and communication, and also have entrepreneurial skills? How do we get them work for us and avoid any kind of competition from them to our business? How can we convince the lead programmer that our startup ...
I am currently working on a system that will generate product recommendations like those on Amazon: "People who bought this also bought this.." This is how I plan to do it: Process the data using Apache Mahout and generate recommendations(data is stored in MySQL), currently item based only. Apply a clustering algorith...
I have a couple of Python modules that are meant to be run as scripts. How should I write the docstrings at the module and function level to make it clear how to run and use the module?