I was in a meeting today with a consultant (consulting us on internal procedures) and we went through an exercise of planning out the next three months of development. I'm not opposed at all to doing this, I think it is essential to have an understanding of what is coming next, in what order, and their relative magnitudes. I also think i...
What is the good resolution of time to use for estimating duration of your tasks? is it like 0.5, 1, 2, 5 days or should you go down to hours like 0.5, 1, 2, 4 hours and then continue up to days? should a change to a label text be task at all? ( ETA < 1min ) Suggestions? ...
I'm planning to write my first program (it'll be in C#), and I need help with a decision. I know I'll want to use custom controls in the final version of the program (probably these), but someone advised me to use standard WinForm controls until the program is running right. They said once things are running right, then I could replace...
Can you give me an UML example of a website or REST server. Thx! ...
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 ...
Does anyone know where I can find examples of class diagrams for RP game development? Something similar to here would be quite useful. I'm not looking for things I can slavishly copy, but just for different examples that diagram various solutions to the problems I'm discovering as I try and pencil down my own classes. ...
I have been asked to automate a particular task at work today which takes up a lot of our time! The following is what needs to be done and I would appreciate any help on how I can do this (Implementation Advice) within the realms of my knowledge, if possible. Problem I have a PowerPoint document (.ppt). I would like to extract text fro...
hello, i've just started learning winapis and c++ programming .. i was thinking about starting a personal project (to enhance my coding, and to help me understand the winapis better).. and i've decided to program a "cmd" files renamer, that basically takes : 1)a path 2)a keyword 3)the desiered formate 4)versioned or not (or numbere...
I would like to learn what tools there are and whether you have positive or negative experiences with them. For me important features are Nesting of tasks within tasks calculation of effort summaries across task hierarchies dependencies between tasks resource allocation Gantt or other timeline view I stumbled across OpenPROJ and it ...
The question: My manager currently believes that design is important, but not crucial for all but the most ambitious projects. It is my opinion that he thinks it is important to design, but not necessary and that big ball of mud programming can 'get the job done.' What are some methods of discussing (topics, examples, etc) the importan...
Our software development department currently consists of a project manager/chief architect, a few developers, and a DBA (as well as some support/helpdesk staff.) We're looking to expand and formalize the roles/positions of the team members as well as bring on addition members. What roles do people feel are essential, ie: absolutely ne...
Does anyone know of an article or could give me some tips to follow when creating a new web project? This project is for myself in my spare time, and not for a client. ...
Hiya, I'm looking for a book that tells you how to split up a software (or anything; doesn't have to be software-specific) task or project into discrete chunks, and helps elucidate all the issues and nuances that aren't apparent when you just start programming. Should I get a book on use cases? If so, what? What I'm looking for is a b...
I am in the preparation stages of writing my first real program. I've designed a set of tables to store my financial data. I know 1) what data goes where in the tables 2) what relationships exist between tables and fields 3) what queries are needed 4) what the forms should look like to write data to the tables 5) what output I need an...
Whilst browsing through answers on SO I came across something that is, in my view, one of the more frequent software development management misconceptions: "[software development] plan is a reasonably detailed description of all the activities you need to undertake". Hence the question: what is good software development plan? Can it be ...
When asked to estimate and/or while reading my coworkers estimates they often read something like this: Make new ############# page with feature ############## - 8 hours Create new ########## control - 21 hours Solve bug in ######## module - 15 hours I think that when the estimate for a single task is more than 5 hours you should str...
At the start of the day, I often just fire up my IDE and work on my current project until I get tired or finish a certain part of the project. But often that doesn't work out too well. Before I get started, if I don't know exactly where I left last time or what I'm going to do today, it feels like I'm expected to take on the entire proj...
Right now, I'm extremely frustrated because I was in the process of developing some cool mechanism to optimize a calculation system by reducing the number of calculations from around half a million to just a few thousands. It took a lot of time examining and analyzing data, writing things down, doing a few tests and in general just doing...
I posted this question on Reddit Programming and did not get a single response. So I am hoping that Stack Overflow community will have an opinion. Have any of you ever been on a software project that had fallen behind, where 'Crashing' or 'Fast-Tracking' the project schedule actually brought the project schedule back on track? I have n...
What is the industry standard break-up (man days effort) for the phases of the SDLC cycle(e.g. Analysis - 35%, Design - 15% etc etc). I beleive the most common phases are: Analysis Design Build and Unit Test Review and Unit Test Execution Assembly Test/Integration Test/UAT Production Deployment ...