Need some advice on working out the team velocity for a sprint. Our team normally consists of about 4 developers and 2 testers. The scrum master insists that every team member should contribute equally to the velocity calculation i.e. we should not distinguish between developers and testers when working out how much we can do in a sprin...
Every time I have to estimate time for a project (or review someone else's estimate), time is allotted for testing/bug fixing that will be done between the alpha and production releases. I know very well that estimating so far into the future regarding a problem-set of unknown size is not a good recipe for a successful estimate. However ...
In question: "What causes developer burnout?" I told of a co-worker who got burned out and ended up leaving the profession. Have you seen developer burnout? Tell the story here. Whether it is funny or just plain sad and touching I'm sure it will tell us something about our profession. This will give us a sense of how common it is as w...
I'm very interested in the community's input on this question: What are some characteristics of a good team of programmers? As a follow-up, what are your suggestions for a non-manager that wants to improve the team that they're on? It seems that some teams cooperate very well together and effectively deal with adversity. There are ...
Non technical people in most cases do not see any value in writing unit tests. They just want to have basic code completed and do not spend money and time on such things like unit tests. Later, every day they just to ask to fix a one bug more. Projects are missing deadlines and they still don't see value in good automated tests. ...
I am currently in the process of restructuring my local Subversion repository by adding some new projects and merging legacy code and data from a couple of older repositories into it. When I have done this in the past I have usually put the legacy code in a dedicated "legacy" folder, as not to "disturb" the new and "well-structured" co...
If you are sending work/progress reports to the project lead on a daily or weekly basis, I wondered if you would consider using Twitter or similar services for this updates. Say if you're working remotly or with a distributed team and the project lead has a hard time getting an overview about the topics people are working and where the ...
So I have some files I want to ignore in a subversion repository, but I don't want my ignore patterns for this to be propagated to the repository. In other words, I added some private files in my checkout that I want to keep, but they only exist for me and wouldn't make sense to be ignored for everyone, so if I use the svn:ignore, this ...
ENG or RUS Language only. ...
Where I work, the design and development departments are totally separated, however we (the design department) are responsible for managing the CSS for our sites. Typically, new CSS needs to be released to the production server far more often than new website code. Because of this, we are deploying the CSS separately, and it lives outsid...
Why is it that customers are seemingly always eager to believe that presenting a few mockup online screens means that the application is just a few tweaks away from being shipped? Ok, I realise the answer lies in the fact that they don't understand the work that has to go on behind the screens to actually provide the necessary functiona...
I'm looking for any tools that can give you code churn metrics (graphs and charts would be even better) for a Subversion repository. One tool I know of is statsvn - a Java tool that creates some HTML reports and some code churn metrics. Statsvn reports the number of lines modified (churned) by user over time, some descriptive stats on ...
Do you actively manage technical debt debt on your software development projects and if so, how do you do it? ...
Hi, What are the general, traditional steps/stages to software development, or more specifically, specification writing? I know of concepts like waterfall method, gathering specifications, use cases, etc. But I want a more formal explanation to it all. ...
So I'm sitting here playing catch up listening to Stack Overflow Podcast #20 and Joel is talking about the Excel guys at MS who wrote their own compiler to improve the performance of code that worked with pointers and it got me wondering when is it NIH versus being a sensible investment of time? Given the situation back then that t...
When triaging bugs for a release, what criteria are typically used to determine whether the bug will be fixed for the release? ...
Which project tracking tool do you use? Does it allow programmers to bill hours worked to projects/tasks? Does it allow to track items promised vs. items delivered? Does it allow to forecast personnel needs when you have only a ballpark estimate of how many hours you are going to need for different task types? Does it integrate with your...
When you are starting a personal programming project, what is your first step? I'm trying to start a project thats just an idea at the moment. I get lots of these and I dive right into the code and after a while just completely lose interest and or just forget about the project. When you are starting, what is your first step? do you pla...
I'm about to start on a large Qt application, which is made up of smaller components (groups of classes that work together). For example, there might be a dialog that is used in the project, but should be developed on its own before being integrated into the project. Instead of working on it in another folder somewhere and then copying i...
The company I work for has some project management issues. It's not that it doesn't work but that I get the impression it could work much better. I'm looking for a good, web-based, project management tool. I've been playing with dotproject which I believe is excellent but I'd like to hear some other approaches (if any). I'm specially i...