I'm working on a new project and we're using a pretty nice stack. NHibernate, Spring, MVC... the list goes on. One thing I've noticed tho is that in the 6 months since we've started we've had a new release of NHibernate, a new release of a third party control toolkit and Windows 7 is on the horizon. We've had problems before where bein...
I've read a number of articles (and methods) where people have integrated Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Project, which allows both project managers and developers to use tools their comfortable with. For example: http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/30187 (Article about connecting) http://www.codeplex.com/pstfsconnector (Third-part...
I would like to analyze and document one of our svn repositories. I am looking for the best tool that will make a report based on the log of the svn repository for each revision number tag, branch, etc. Is there any free/paid tool available for this? ...
Hello, We are constantly trying to find tools that helps us better manage our projects. But all the time we have a dilemma, we find some tools that are better as far as the developers are concerned, but suck as far as project managers. The best example is: as a developer the best choice would be TRAC as a Project manager i would go fo...
Hi all, After serveral years developement, I believe that there is no SIMPLE application in the world, though Clients often say "I have a simple requirement". There are too many things to think and to do in a software development. So I start thinking the following question: What features should an application natually have, or at leas...
I'm starting with a web project and I would like to write its functionality and features on a "piece of paper" like professionals do. I have to prepare the documentation for the project with all information about the purpose and project overview, database structure, MVC and REST functionality (model, view, controller), website and wi...
Hi all, Recently I've become very concerned about "dependencies" in projects / systems. I had a very bad time when somebody deprecated a database server that nobody should have been using in my company and then suddenly lots of systems stopped working because they were using that database in a hidden corner in the code and nobody remem...
I would like to know, from your expertise, what you consider to be the main differences and/or similarities of managing the development of products and software in large teams. By products, I'm referring to physical engineered objects like a printer, cellphone, car. It's my assumption that both go through a similar cycle of: feature ...
I've been working on a large, multi-year project as a web architect. So far, my responsibility has been to take requirements documentation provided by the customer's analyst and translate them into technical design documentation. The 'powers that be' suggest that I take over the requirements documentation and combine them with my effor...
Situation: A team is currently working in the same office. Due to reasons unknown to the team members, they will have to be split up to work on different offices. What are the possible obstacles for the project if team members are geographical far from each other? ...
I'd like to hear how other web developers manage their websites over the life of the project. For example I have several sites I've been developing for several years where a "version" could be a completely separate code base. So version 1.0 might be straight html and version 2.0 might be a symfony app. There is also the issue of tho...
I use VIM as my main text editor here at work and I often have 10-15 files open at once in a couple of windows with several tabs, each of which has its own split windows. I love using VIM, but I hate having to re-do my entire set-up every time the dev server gets bounced or my machine crashes. Is there a way to get VIM to remember a setu...
I'm interested in what constitutes a big team and what ratio of developers, Architects, Testers, Managers etc. Does anyone have any figures for team sizes on well known projects like windows or SQL Server for instance? ...
I work with a mid-sized team of developers all working on one product. Developers write the code to address a feature or bug fix ticket, then check it into our main development branch (in Subversion). Once the ticket has been tested and validated there by the QA folks, I merge it into the trunk. I normally do this manually, since a lo...
To protect ourselves from later patent claims etc. we feel the urge to track contributions being made to the core code of a future open source project. We thought of the following procedure if we get contributions: a contributor has to do a quick registration with us if he commits more than just small bugfixes to our main codebase (st...
There is another post on here "How to quote project development cost" where user SpliFF commented: This is not a labor market, you are selling knowledge and solutions. Some solutions are better than others. 10 hours of failing is worth much less than 10 hours of building a killer app. You need to stop thinking about time...
I know this may sound like a totally silly question, but here it is: Did you meet a programmer who is running out of luck ? We have a colleague that is not getting any work done, every task that is assigned to him hits a major block (a bug or a missing piece of information). If we put anyone else on it, it just gets done. That guy didn'...
After building up and running lots of WatiN tests, what are some good ways to organize the tests? If I was asked "Do we have a test that does X, then Y?" How would I look that up? Would it be with all tests surrounding X or Y? It seems after getting lots of tests in here, organization becomes a bit of an issue. I'm just looking for some...
Hi, I have been in the IT industry for 10 years now but have worked in "traditionally" managed project teams (both well managed and badly managed ones). I have heard of the "new" scrum or XP type of project management and yearned to be part of one (as s/w folks we always like anything new I guess) but have not got an opportunity. My q...
We started a project that will be managed with Scrum/XP. We wrote the whole product backlog upfront for evaluation purposes. We're making sure all stories are customer-centric and we're evaluating them by story business value: MoSCoW technique - Must, should, could, would/won't have this implemented story effort/complexity (= story poi...