I'm a s/w developer in a small internal IT department within a financial firm and have worked on a number of small-medium sized projects that have had little or no project management throughout. This seems to always result in scope creep and therefore not meeting deadlines and having to sacrifice good design/code to satisfy users/manage...
As a developer I often release different versions of applications that I want tested by users to identify bugs and to confirm requirements are being met. I give the users a rough idea of what I have changed or new features that need testing, but this seems a bit slap-dash and not very well strucutured. I'd like to know what approaches ...
When I am unsure about some thing for a project, I usually use a small separate project and make it my playground for things need to be tested. How do you do that ? ...
I would like your opinion (through experience) of implementing stricter processes in the aim of improving quality of shipping software. Assume a fairly large software with lots of processes(89) and databases and messaging, IPC, sockets, web servers and the full works (enterprisy made in Java). Some parts are fairly messy (1000 line funct...
For a upcoming project, there are plans to port the existing C++ code that compiles on Windows and Linux to the MacOS(leopard). The software is command line application, but a GUI front end might be planned. The MacOS uses the g++ compiler. By having the same compiler as Linux, it does not seem like there would be any issues, but there...
Which Computer-aided Software Engineering tools do you use and why? In what ways do they increase your productivity or help you design your programs? Or, in case you do not use CASE tools, what are your reasons for this? ...
I am wondering how everybody plans their web apps. Do you write out a list of functions and tick them off when done? Do you have stacks of paper with Use Cases all over them? What is the sweet spot between not planning at all and doing so much planning that your deadline has passed before you have even started? EDIT: Most of the web ap...
I'm interested in knowing any software engineering techniques developers might use when first starting an Open Source project. I would imagine that conventional processes would not be applicable, as many assume interaction with other developers, which might not be available when a project is first starting out. What facets of the pletho...
I am currently working on a project with five other developers and we are using subversion for our revision control system. We have established that we have 12 milestones leading up to the first release of our software. We have labeled the milestones using version numbers (0.1 through 0.12) and descriptive labels. For example: 0.1 - Na...
Developing software solutions which already exist and are available for re-use (either commercial or open-source). AKA "re-inventing the wheel". Same as above, but your solution being broken. AKA "re-inventing the square wheel". Developing solutions for problems which do not exist. Again, I'm interested in a more formal approach, e.g....
I am writing a project in C++ for an embedded system with no OS support; almost no library support. Very bare-metal. Hence, a fair amount of my code is tightly coupled(e.g., software triggered interrupts and the layer directly above them). Part of what I am doing involves changing the serial port configuration, thus driving concurrent c...
I have a SVN repository for my project; it keeps code, docs, graphs, etc. Everything related to the project is there and versioned. However, I am trying to get some kind of intelligent stats for my code. The stat program I am using is StatSVN - they seem to be best of breed as far as I can tell. However, I am getting results for old fil...
Why should I do Nightly Builds? ...
Right now I'm working on a web application that receives a significant amount of data from a database that has a potential to return null results. When going through the cyclomatic complexity for the application a number of functions are weighing in between 10 - 30. For the most part the majority of the functions with the high numbers ha...
Forgive me for asking a rather general question, but how do you psychologically deal with high levels of complexity in software projects? I'm working on a personal compiler project and am currently trying to understand the unmanaged .net metadata API (and before anybody mentions it, Reflection.Emit is not sufficient for my needs!) which...
Being a CS student I've had to take a course in basic software engineering. I was a little curious to find such elaborate "software development processes", like the spiral model, the waterfall model, et cetera. Some of these methodologies seem a little antiquated to me and, after speaking with several employed developers, I can't seem ...
I have tried my best but have not been able to wrap my head around the concept of CONOPs. Can someone help with examples? ...
Is software development engineering? If no, what are the things that it lacks in order to be qualified thus? AFAIK, there is a software engineering institute at the Carnigie mellon university, that prescribes and maintains the CMMI standards. Is that something that will turn development into engineering? Also, what is your opinion on th...
Apart from the archetypical code-review checklist, what are some good places to use checklists in software engineering? ...
For example, would it be incredibly dangerous to do it for avionics software? Note, I don't completely understand Agile. ...