Has anyone had any experience in building a 'real world' application with the Smart Client Software Factory, from Microsofts Patterns and Practices group? I'm looking for advice on how difficult it was to master, whether it decreased your time to market and any other general pitfalls....
What software metaphors have worked best for you in discussing and explaining the complexities of software development with non-technical management? ...
I'm looking for a way to give out preview or demo versions of our software to our customers as easy as possible. The software we are currently developing is a pretty big project. It consists of a client environment, an application server, various databases, web services host etc. The project is developed incrementally and we want to shi...
Stackoverflow is the first time I've seen this badges concept. It's oddly motivating, and that's pretty cool. Has anybody seen it applied to source control change sets? I envision a data mining system that monitors a source repo and maybe a continuous integration system and flags significant deltas in various code centric metrics. Th...
Which features and services in Vista can you remove with nLite (or tool of choice) to make a Virtual PC-image of Vista as small as possible? The VPC must work with development in Visual Studio. A normal install of Vista today is like 12-14 GB, which is silly when I got it to work with Visual Studio at 4 GB. But with Visual Studio it to...
Extreme Programming, Scrum and Test Driven Development definitely seem to be the most popular Agile methods at the moment. But someone recently suggested that I take a look at Feature Driven Development. Have you ever used this method with any success? What are the advantages of using it? ...
For me a multistage environment contains environments for development, testing, quality assurance, maybe a client review stage and finally production. It should allow easy collaboration between developers, project status tracking and easy deployment of the application to any stage for a specific version. You can propose specific tools ...
In the course of your software development lifecycle, what essential design artifacts do you produce? What makes them essential to your practice? The project I'm currently on has been in production for 8+ years. This web application has been actively enhanced and maintained over that time. While we have CMMI based policies and processes...
The question of TFS versus OSS has already been asked, with most answers tending toward OSS as the better alternative. I'm in a position where my employer (an ISV with a mix of onshore, offshore development staff) is about to take the plunge to TFS. We currently develop with VS 2008, subversion, and various supporting toolsl NUnit, NCo...
I'm trying to learn Agile Software Development principles in a hurry and don't have time to wait for a book to arrive. What would you recommend as the best free online tutorial on Agile Development methodology? Edit: I agree with the answers that learning things in a hurry is not the way to go about it but as one poster guessed, I'm tr...
I am trying to write a spec for a software application. The application takes inputs from static files (configuration data), files that it obtained by ftp, and "live" data obtained via a TCP socket. It does some stuff and generates output data, which is delivered to somebody else via a TCP socket. It is not so difficult to write a spec ...
Ideally it would be great if those in management had at least some background in software development. On a number of occasions though, as a software developer, I have found myself dealing with what some might deem (unfairly?) "clueless" management individuals. Rather then turn this into a anti-management ranting session, can you provi...
How many people actually write an SDD document before writing a single line of code? How do you handle large CSCI's? What standard do you use for SDD content? What tailoring have you done? ...
I'm asking this because I'm currently in the position of fixing bugs that are found in modules written by other people who are still working in the company. My personal belief is that everyone should clean their own mess because they know better what they wanted to do in those modules, and usually if someone from "outside" comes and mod...
I'm curious what assistive technologies tech-savvy SO users recommend. What tools do you use to facilitate text entry and web navigation? I'm especially interested in solutions that don't require voice-commands, since programming requires keywords that can be a pain to spell manually. ...
Who are the best thinkers in each problem domain? Please provide one domain per answer, and post it wiki editable. Answers should include the resources (papers, books, podcasts, youtube video, blogs, etc.) that support the work those thinkers have done. My hope is voting will float the more coherent domains to the top, and wiki editing ...
I was wondering what final steps developers take before they release their new project. ...
This certainly presupposes that unit testing is a good thing. Our projects have some level of unit testing, but it's inconsistent at best. What are the most convincing ways that you have used or have had used with you to convince everyone that formalized unit testing is a good thing and that making it required is really in the best inte...
We have an offer to develop a CRM, but we have only two months. We have team of 3 or 4 programmers (2 are experienced and 2 are good prorammers). Should we accept the offer? AND Is there any good opensource i.e. free CRM or ERP system? (written in java) with which we won't start from scratch? ...
In this day of the internet, do good quality developer-orientated paper-based magazines still exist and are any worth reading? I know that Microsoft do their MSDN magazine, but that is very much .NET orientated. Do general purpose magazines still exist? Would you recommend any of them? (Question closed as it is a duplicate of another qu...