Background: On a new project I've found myself 3 levels removed from my actual source of information. I report to my PM, who reports to our contractor, who reports to the actual client. Getting answers to questions has become something of a problem and I'm curious to know what people recommend. Needs: I'm trying to find a technology or...
I have a client who I'm trying to convince to implement Subversion (I know, I know). My pitch goes something like this: His test domain is visible to Google and other webcrawlers, despite his best efforts (robot.txt not withstanding). By putting the repository on an svn:// URL, we could avoid having the code crawled until the deploymen...
During beta testing, sometimes our end-users unfortunately encounter a bug. This inevitably leads to a bug report, where the Joel on Software article Painless Bug Tracking suggests: Every good bug report needs exactly three things. Steps to reproduce, What you expected to see, and What you saw instead. This is usua...
My team is currently working on an ASP .NET website. We are one of the first teams in our organization to use TFS2008 for source control. When I joined the project, it had already been active for a few months. Below is a diagram of the basic file structure we are using in TFS: $/TfsProject/ | | /* Contains our in-house class libraries...
Since 1.5 years, I am a part of a relative small development team with less than 5 developers (not all of the team members are stable and some have left the project during the time I was here). We have a project manager and a parallel team of 3 people who do mostly business stuff and customer care, occasionally testing the software befor...
I have just started to write code in C, C++, Java, ASP.NET, C#, Objective-C, I-Phone, etc. But I don't understand why i have to spend 20% of my time for fixing bugs. I just learned those programming languages as they are. Do most programmers face this type of problem? ...
We have a relatively small team of developers with less than 5 people in it and a project manager. What do you think is the typical set of responsibilities a project manager should have in such a team ? I am looking at the thing more from the developer's perspective and want to know what should I expect from the manager and what should I...
I have a small project that only employs 2 developers right now (Maybe there will be more developers later, but i wanna keep it small). Maybe it can be non-php software, but i should work fine online at Sourceforge.net. So, can anyone tell me which would be the best free (OpenSouce preferred) software for project management, the feature...
I am working on a team that is exploring the possibility of adopting agile development practices. One question that we are running up against is deciding when an iteration (sprint) should complete. Let's say we've defined our feature backlog, and produced story-point estimates for them, and we have decided that the first 30-day sprint ...
This question is a follow up for this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2083020/need-some-advice-about-web-development-project I would like to know if there are techniques or tools we could use in order for us to do our project effectively. To make this more specific, I'm basically looking for something that will help us work...
Hi, I'm looking for some references or best practices with regard to the proportion of different skill sets that needs to me on a typical medium sized software development team. Assuming 40 development staff, what proportion should be SQA, UI designers, project managers, data specialists etc? The problem domain is general engineering...
Hello all, I've been working on a project that has just been outsourced about 1/2 into SharePoint integration. My role is UX/design and all front-end development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript). This outsourcing is a first for me and I'm wanting to compile some handoff materials that will help the new folks doing the integration. I'm imagining th...
IDE misconfiguration is a big source of inefficient time use in our team. I wanted to know if other teams have tried to check the health of the eclipse workspace with continuous integration. Eclipse is open source and extensible, and most (all?) of its files are in xml. So it should not be difficult to add a step to continuous integrati...
We outsourced a web based portal and now we're not interested to work with them because the site is becoming more buggy day by day and increase of customers complain. We've chosen a different team based on their local reputation and their portfolio are good to satisfy our urgent needs. We discussed this project with them and during a w...
Hello. My question is about more general workflow of a development team rather than a direct coding problem, and I don't know if this type of questions are allowed here. We have created a digital agency-like brand in a multi-brand company. All of us (currently 4 people) are experienced freelancers but none of us worked in a serious deve...
If one does use Scrum for the Software development portion of a project, does one still use PMBOK or some other project management methodology for the "other" tasks on a project e.g. the business, marketing, training tasks. What is the project management of non software development tasks referred to i.e. traditional project management? ...
The more I am in the industry the more it appears to me that the average developers that I have met along my way are not really passionate about getting better in any way (e.g. reading books or articles, participating in communities outside the company like SO etc.). While I realize that at least until there will be enough qualified pe...
I think one method is keep one code base, when export, manually add or not add these additional files per release requirement. But it require you to remember doing this each time export a copy, which is easy to forget. I created a branch for the project in SVN with these files included, but problem is each time i change the trunk, i nee...
Have you got any best practices when starting to work on a project using technology or a language you have never worked with before ? Do you just go ahead with what you know and get to learn more as obstacles come or do you have any prerequisite steps you always go through ? The question is in fact what additional measures would you ta...
Right now, my project is slightly requirements starved; the project managers can't get good requirements as fast as we can build them, so we're being less efficient than we probably could be. How many developers per project manager makes for a good balance? ...