We are just going through defining our story cards for the next project. We have a good idea what the customer want through workshops We have a business requirement document that will be signed off by them. Our proces of defining storys is as follows We take a feature the customer wants and write a story We have a brief design disc...
Apologies if this has been covered frequently, but I was wondering about how other people approach personal task management. I've read (parts of) GTD, proceeded to get excited, installed a tonne of plug-ins all over the place, then let it all fall by the wayside. I've used todoist, outlook, google calendar, project. I've tried writing ...
I am looking for introductory and intermediate materials on scheduling algorithms (books, papers, you name it). I am also interested in reference implementations and libraries, any language will do. The goal is to evenly distribute set of recurring activities over time span. Also a number of constraints must be satisfied: resource avail...
I'm beginning to plan a complete redesign of our departments intranet pages. As it stands, every department gets their own folder within root. They all share the same look and feel but don't use CSS everything in each file is straight up static text. Basically, if a change has to be made to the header, every file must get changed. The nu...
There are several ways to do burn down charts in Scrum. Some people suggest using the story points of unfinished stories left as your burn down charts in Scrum. Pro: Only finished stories lower the chart Contra: Chart doesn't move down in the beginning and then rapidly falls off Others suggest to use the number of tasks left Pro: Ch...
Does the functional spec help or hinder your expectations? Do programmers who practice the waterfall methodology, are they open to functional specs? I'm a web designer/developer working with a team of 5 programmers and would like to write a functional spec to explain what we need, so that when I begin my work - I know we are working towa...
I've only had to code in C a few times, and it seems like every time I do, it becomes some unmanageable beast. I've done most of my programming in C# and .Net so I am very accustomed to the class style architecture, but I can't seem to grasp organization in C applications. Should I put functions that are related in a certain file, put f...
Using Web Service technology, we want to design and implement an online bookshop business. At the minimum, it should allow customers to browse the catalogue and order books, it should process credit card details, and coordinate shipping of books. Sketch out a high-level architecture for this system. The architecture should include key co...
Is there any tool specially designed to analyze Apache traffic logs and give some advices on future load (bandwidth & requests per second)? I am searching for some tools to help me understand better how the server is used and where the performance bottleneck will appear. ...
My company is starting work on building a web-based RSS reader that users can sign up to and track feeds; a lot like Google Reader. My first thought was that once I have a feed URL for a certain blog or website, I'd only have to poll it once in order to grab the content and then insert entries into the database for anyone who subscribes...
I've got a client with a critical website down. The site is written in PHP & the website host upraded from php4 to php5). It's a Sunday here and I was wondering where you would suggest are the best job boards or similar for getting somone with 'reputation' competent enough to complete the fixes? Edit: Not sure why this has gotten dow...
How do your store your company's accumulated internal knowledge? Meeting minutes, software specifications, plans, notes about other organisations, documents for discussion and storage, agendas... We're involved in software development but it's not our primary focus. So our wiki/CMS needs to be able to easily link to files in SVN and Tra...
I'm working on a PHP/MySQL rating system right now. For the user to be able to rate the user has to log in. Each user has a unique "UID". There will be multiple rating instances on the website (one for every game, in my case) and I need an efficient way of storing a list of UIDs in a MySQL row (one MySQL row in the ratings table for each...
Because my time is limited I can usually only focus on one or two of my hobby projects, while the others sit there wasting away. I am looking for a solution that would allow me to divide my time better. is open sourcing where I take the role of guiding the project realistic, or are there better solutions? In my case, one project has a ...
I've been involved in the assessing whether a number of our systems need to be rewritten from the ground up or if they should be partially rewritten, or if they should just continue as is with patches on top. In order to better assess the situation I was wondering what questions I should be asking myself and others to help determine the...
I need to create an interface for building photo galleries. I've got a good idea of how I want the UI to work, and I'm looking for input regarding existing scripts I could use, jquery plugins, general advice, etc.. The UI will consist of a narrow column on the left that will contain small thumbnails of all the users images. The rest of ...
In our small development team we are adopting the agile way of developing our software. We try to stick to one month development cycles. At the beginning we play what we call "the planning game". The idea is to filter out all the issues and find out the ones to be handled in the upcoming iteration. Here it is in a nutshell: every person...
If a senior software engineer is asked to develop an internal technical training, can she apply the estimation and planning techniques (related to software development) she knows? ...
I’m working on a project and have developed the high level user requirements for what the system must do. This project is a php mvc web application built on the CodeIgniter framework. Now I’m trying to take those requirements and break them down further into controllers/actions. What is the best way to do this? I was thinking of cr...
I'm trying to come up with a checklist or set of questions/criteria to assess and evaluate proposed or emergent architectures (perform architectural reviews). What are the most important questions you ask when trying to plan, assess or review an architecture? I know this is a large topic so I'd like to constrain it to a single end-to...