How do you estimate the time needed to implement a user story? If it's something you had done before you know how long it'll take. But what about if it's completely new to you? How much time do you reserve for "surprises"? ...
If you had to do without one or the other in a software project, which would you pick? I've had plenty of projects in which the client or PM thought they could get away without one or the other. We always paid the price. ...
Duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14279/how-to-estimate-the-length-of-a-programming-task I'll admit it up front: I'm Boris, I'm a junior programmer and I suck at estimating my develop time. I read a few books and was told by my professors how to plan my projects, but my core question never gets answered: You never know the ...
Are there any practices regarding using codenames of products in Visual Studio projects and solutions? In that typically, namespaces, assembly names, binary outputs, et al need to be renamed once a product name is chosen: is there any way to deal with this? ...
When do you know it's time to refactor/review some piece of code ? And better yet, when do you do it? Probably like others, I've found myself knowing that something needs a refactor/review but deadlines and management left no time for that. I'd also like to hear how you include code review in the general development process. Lately I'v...
I'm a lone developer who would like to get some structure to my projects. My hardware setup is a laptop running windows XP and a desktop running Ubuntu that acts as a storage server. I currently use Mercurial as my source control system with my working copy of the repository stored on my laptop and clone the repository to the Ubuntu ma...
All of the questions that I've asked recently about Python have been for this project. I have realised that the reason I'm asking so many questions may not be because I'm so new to Python (but I know a good bit of PHP) and is probably not because Python has some inherent flaw. Thus I will now say what the project is and what my current ...
Hi All, Can anyone tell the reasons for choosing a particular programming language over others for a project. I mean does this thought cross the minds at the design phases of a project, or all this stuff is just theoretical, and in reality people use whatever languages they are conversant with? Thanks Aman Jain ...
I've never written functional specs, I prefer to jump into the code and design things as I go. So far its worked fine, but for a recent personal project I'm writing out some specs which describe all the features of the product, and how it should 'work' without going into details of how it will be implemented, and I'm finding it very valu...
Most software projects do not start out with a huge public userbase... so how do projects get their first few users? What are some ways to get people to find out about the project? Once they find it, how would one get them interested in trying it out if it looks like they will be the first few to jump in? In case it is not clear, when I...
Howdy, Is there a pattern where in WPF, I can build a simple UI form from an XML like definition file pulled from a database? It would allow the user to enter data into this form, and submit it back. The data would be sent back in an XML structure that would closely/exactly mimic the UI definition. The definition should includ...
When you have an idea that is blazing through your head for a product, yet everything that is right with the world tells you to plan this application before jumping into a code rush, what methods do you use to prevent rushing to code? From my experience planning software as apposed to building the software ad-hoc has always proven to ...
As a freelancer I have to interview with clients at least occasionally. Based on Really “wow” them in the interview I came up with the idea of putting together a checklist for the first discussion. Although the topic is similar to the other thread, I believe that there are differences between looking for a job as employee or as freelance...
When dealing with MySQL, I typically use the BOOLEAN type, which is equivalent to TINYINT(1), or 1/0 In most languages I work with, true/false is preferred When displaying forms, sometimes "Yes / No" makes more sense ...
I am currently in my final year at school, studying for a Higher National Diploma in Computer Studies, and basically in this final semester, we need to develop a Software Project, that basically incorporates a whole system. Now, what I'm thinking of doing is something along the lines of Robocode, but instead of Java, I will be doing th...
Do you inflate your estimated completion dates? If so why? How much? I tend to inflate mine a little because I can be overly optimistic. ...
I was put in charge of maintaining, alone, a project that I never worked on before, altough I just received this task, and just started to look around the code, management asked me how long it would take to implement some new features and bugfixes. How should I evaluate this, what´s the better approach? Should I evaluate the time to "jus...
I've always wanted to sketch all ideas I come up with in the computer instead of on paper, but everyone knows that sketching with good 'ol fashioned pen and paper beats the crap out of trying to do it with a mouse (or even worse, a touch pad). So I turn to stack overflow with this question: Does any one of you know a magic program that ...
I am reading Code Complete as well as a couple of other programming books at the moment. The size of the project affects a lot of other parameters that you need to take heed of in planning, coding, automating tests, etc. I was wondering what people on SO generally use in the real world to categorize a project in it's correct "weight clas...
This post is a follow-up of this answered question: Best method for storing a list of user IDs. I took cletus and Mehrdad Afshari's epic advice of using a normalized database approach. Are the following tables properly set up for proper optimization? I'm kind of new to MySQL efficiency, so I want to make sure this is effective. Also,...