Does anyone have any good techniques or examples on how to promote the benefits of Agile development practices in a waterfall driven corporate environment? We recently switched to feature based development, using trunk & branch code management, we have a one project running well with scrum, but its hard to get this approach adopted by t...
For programmers working in corporate environments and outside of the start up world, there are a wide variety of non-technical people that are important stakeholders in the development process. These include other functions within the company such as marketing, finance and legal, for example, and also include customers and others outsid...
Does your company offer you training courses to enhance your skills? How many courses per year are you allowed to take part in? Does your company pay for the training courses or do you have to pay for them? Please let me know what you think about this subject and how your company treats this. EDIT: Not many answers up to now, but it ...
I'm looking for a corporate collaboration tool to help bring together my team, who are geographically and organisationally distributed. Some team members operate on client sites, behind corporate firewalls and similar. The restrictions I have are: Must allow creation of persistent 'channels' (i.e. not just one-to-one or one-to-many c...
I work for a smallish software shop with a mix of internal products, and external consulting. For the last few years I've been working on in house apps at the office with a bunch of other geeks. Fairly laid back and productive. Pretty much perfect coding conditions: good equipment quiet, focused team rooms with a few developers who are...
After working for a long time within a large business as a self developed developer you can become very proficient at translating "geek speak" into "business speak". This tends to include spending an increasing amount of time in requirements gathering, specification, project management, best practice, management of other developers etc a...
I am writing software that will be used ONLY internally in a corporate environment, and the company will never market the software or make it available outside it's own confines. If I use open source (i.e. GPL) code in my application, does the company have any obligation to release what I write? Or if it's never marketed can we keep th...
When hiring a programmer, do you tend to prioritize fundamentals or knowledge of specific technologies higher? Fundamentals include things like algorithms, data structures, decent communication ability, good understanding of design patterns and principles, a good understanding of system fundamentals such as memory management and pointer...
I'm curious to hear about people's experiences with distributed version control in a corporate environment. Specifically: Was it difficult to gain adoption? Now that it's in place, is it well liked? What 'model' are you using (hub & spoke? Something else?) Allowing you use hub & spoke, are there any discipline problems with pushing t...
I keep hearing about Rails being used by startups but have not heard of, say, Morgan Stanley using it. Is there a list somewhere of bigger companies that use Rails internally? ...
Are there any figures for its adoption in corporate environments? Does anyone know of large corporations that have adopted it for projects? ...
I plan on starting a simple micro ISV selling some dot.net and classic ASP components. I'm talking $50 components here, not anything major. However, I don't want to go through the hassle and expense of incorporating because, after all, this can fail miserably anyways like everything else I do. Plan is to put up a website, buy adword...
Suppose you were writing a network-based WinForms application which is supposed to run in a "paranoid" environment due to restrictive company policies at the customer site. What kind of restrictions did such hostile environment have, and what did you do to design around them? Some examples to begin with: Problem: There is a very restr...
I’m interested in some feedback from the folks out there who have experience with developing software in the corporate environment. I’m talking about organisations whose core business is not technology related and the role of IT and subsequently software developers are considered enabling functions. There are obviously some fundamental d...
Recently we’ve seen the emergence of so-called “Shadow IT” within many organisations. If you’re not already familiar with the term, it refers to those who manage to dodge the usual IT governance by means such as using thumb drives to share files or “unapproved” software products to achieve business tasks. Shadow IT can emerge from within...
Is SQL Express 2008 available for corporate, business and government use? Are there restrictions I am not reading about? I know it is free, but I just want to make sure I am not stepping on any terms of use. Maybe I missed it when I clicked around Microsoft’s site, but I didn't see any terms referencing use restrictions specifically. I...
I work for a large company currently going through a merger. We are working on several projects involving and not involving the merger. One problem I'm noticing is that many of the groups of developers are very fragmented, even though they mostly support many different projects within their own realm of the business, and the databases ...
As a professional programmer I work daily with a species known as the "PM". While they usually go by that common acronym, it seems there are actually several discrete varieties: product managers, project managers, and program managers. There may be other species yet undiscovered. Through years of close observation and study, the subtleti...
I am very experienced in working with open-source technologies like PHP, MySQL, Apache and others. I feel like home working with them and the code comes to me with little effort. I recently started playing with the ASP.NET technology (I know it doesn't compare to PHP, or does it?) and everything seems very easy, but still I don't feel l...
It started one day while I was using my iPod Touch: wouldn't it be cool to have XXX function (from our internal desktop application) available on the iPhone as an native app. I had that idea because (A) I think our current bulky desktop internal 6+ years old application suite needs a major face lift, and (B) instead of continuing our wa...