I'll soon be starting a company with a friend. There will be several parts of it where we work on the same section of a site and as far as I can forsee, the potential for muck-ups is huge. It's just two people so do we really need to use a version control system and are there any suggestions that you can give in helping us work as a mor...
What is the best way to point out flaws in a developers code? Stuff they've been working on a while and though you'd love to not say anything, it's bad code and something has to be said. How do you go about it without them getting angry at you?...
[Assuming you write code on a team] Does your team actually agree on a coding style standard? Independent of what language you are using, I'm curious to know A) do you agree and B) are the styles something you created as a group or did you decide to use a "third party's" style guide? Our team uses C# primarily, and we've taken to using...
I've been asked to join in with a project and there is no actual leader (it's not a business setting), worse still there are about 8 members and because of this, there is no actual action plan. I'd volunteer myself as the leader or manager but I don't have the time or inclination to do so, should I just watch it struggle (and possibly ne...
Last year we were focused on improve our technical capacities and leveraging our knowledge of various architectures and frameworks and methodologies. This year (August mark the start of a new accounting year) we need to improve our productivity. By this I don't means we need to get more KLOCs per month per programmer. What we need is t...
What are some of the day to day things you do in your dev team that help build your team's morale? ...
What's the best way to organise my personal TODO list? and what tools are available for organising team TODO lists? Should I still be thinking in terms of TODO or are there better ways to manage my time and projects? See also this question on Organization which is similar ...
Most of the development teams I have worked with have been geographically dispersed often across several continents. What techniques and tools have you found effective when working with a team which does not sit together in the same office? ...
I work for the company's research team, which is pretty selective in hiring. Having said that, we all tend to work on different projects, so it is very easy to cut corners because no one is watching. I know that I have done it when time crunched. Every now and then, I have to work on someone else's project. Whenever this happens, I...
Our organization is undertaking a re-org to solve our current resource and communications issues. I know, a re-org never solves anything, etc. With that being said, I was tapped to go from an individual contributor (aka tech lead/architect) to leading a team of maintenance developers and analysts. I'm very aware of all of the stigmas as...
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...
Ok so a good few months back i started hearing about F# and all the goodness it has, i bought Don Syme's book and started reading. At first i was really excited at how elegant it seemed to make certain tasks. But then i found a problem, although the language seems great it is quite different from what i use in work which means my co-...
Background Last year, I did an internship in a physics research group at a university. In this group, we mostly used LabVIEW to write programs for controlling our setups, doing data acquisition and analyzing our data. For the first two purposes, that works quite OK, but for data analysis, it's a real pain. On top of that, everyone was m...
Here is a situation: You have a project (for example Visual Studio solution with multiple projects) Project relies on various environment variables, libraries, tools and other dependencies. You have to share this project (via source control repository) across multiple developers. Developers don't have similar environment (e.g. librar...
Multi-tasking is shown to be at least 15% less productive than dedicating people to a project (from Mythical Man Month), however in some cases it seems unavoidable. Part of the agile way is to build trust with your customer/team by delivering on time and rarely blowing your iteration schedules. This is difficult when multiple project...
So I have a backlog of features and we are about to get started on a sizable project. I am working on defining the structure of our sprints and I'm interested in the communities feedback. What I'm thinking is: One day sprint planning Fill the backlog and figure out what each dev will go after this sprint Three weeks of development ...
Everyone that has ever had to perform any form of code review has probably been here. You're a member of a code review team, and during the code review you come to an issue where a member of the team is overly aggressive about their viewpoint of a solution, whether it is right or wrong. How would you handle such a situation, especial...
Our team is pretty committed to code walkthroughs. I define a walkthrough as: Where two people sit down next to a computer and look at a diff prior to committing. I do find them to be very time consuming, but it is often the case that good results are generated from such a procedure. So my question is, what is the single technique/...
Companies in my area use to grow rapidly, And, the more and more employers require the "team playing". What is the best reply? I just did well in my own rock band, and, i play fine on a remote but those are the place where evryone has own task, say, SW developer, or sysadm, or the musioc tool, like drums, and so on, but the team of devel...
Imagine you're working with developers who habitually write 300 line nested methods full of errors, possible errors, etc. etc. Applications regularly throw exceptions as a matter of course, and much time is spend hunting odd intermittent bugs. How do you go about making the case for better code and better standards? How do you make the...