I've been thinking about software estimation lately, and I have a bunch of questions around time spent coding. I'm curious to hear from people who have had at least a couple years of experience developing software. When you have to estimate the amount of time you'll spend working on something, how many hours of the day do you spend codi...
The CodePlex team has a Slack time policy, and it's worked out very well for them. Jim Newkirk and myself used it to work on the xUnit.net project. Jonathan Wanagel used it to work on SvnBridge. Scott Densmore and myself used it to work on an ObjectBuilder 2.0 prototype. For others, it was a great time to explore things that were tec...
Brad's recent question "How much of your work day is spent coding?" got me thinking about the abstraction layer you want to create for your developers. I am a big promoter of giving my developers what they need to get the job done. I hope that my developer's spend about 80% - 90% of the day coding. One thing that helps me do that, is ...
This is a daily question, for me, and I think one that is applicable to any professional programmer, especially those who, like myself, work for consulting firms and may have insane amounts of money billed for each hour they work. How do you deal with the fact that if I get a call from my wife and talk for 10 minutes, that's $30 of my c...
I'm currently working on a quite large library (5M lines of code, in C++ under VS2005, 1 solution and close to 100 projects). Even though we distribute compilation, and use incremental linking, recompilation and relinking after small source modifications takes between a few minutes (usually at least 3) and close to one hour. This means ...
As project manager, your required to organize your time so that the project meets a deadline. Is there some sort of equation to use for estimating how long development will take for let's say the database (like time = sql storeprecedures * tables manipulated or something similar) or are you just stuck having to get the experience to get ...
When you are working on hobby projects at home, how do you make yourself productive? Is it planning and self discipline? Do you make notes etc? Creating the right environment? Music? Silence? Good desk? PC set up? Taking the phone off the hook?! If you have a couple of hours and you want to get stuff done, what do you do to make the ...
Almost everyday I see new stuffs coming out of Beta or CTP releases from Microsoft. It used to be exciting but the list of products and technologies is getting bigger and bigger everyday. WPF, WF, Silverlight, Powershell, SSIS, SSDS, EF, LINQ, WCF, Data Services, XAML, Asp.Net AJAX, Asp.Net MVC blah blah.. Since I am in a Technical rol...
What is the best/most productive tools you use for time tracking? Specifically, I'm looking for time tracking tools that: Allow you to tag/start/stop time sessions quickly and as automatic as possible. Has an efficient organizing feature. Take up the least amount of workspace, preferably desktop-based. The organizing feature is a bi...
Working with software day-to-day usually means you have to juggle project work, meetings, calls and other interrupts. What single technique, trick, or tool do you find most useful in managing your time? How do you stay focused? What is your single biggest distraction from your work? ...
I am running a small office for a while and need to do some scheduling. Employees have widely varying availability (part time environment), and there are certain times of the day where I need certain numbers of people there. I also want to impose constraints as far as how many hours each person works. I have looked, and perhaps I have...
With the plethora of communication methods available to co-workers, how do you manage to keep distractions at bay for a large enough block of time to accomplish some focused programming? Do you quit or close all communications, have you informed people that an away message really means you are a way, or something else? ...
From what I understand, the crystals on PC's are notorious for clock skew. If clocks are always skewing, what is the best way to synchronize clocks between machines with millisecond accuracy and precision? From what I've found, NTP and PTP are possible solutions, but I was wondering if anybody had any experience on stackoverflow.com! I ...
I usually find that after a couple of hours "in the zone", I need to take a break, get some fresh air and get a new perspective. Often, these breaks allow me to generate a solution to some stumbling block that was preventing progress. If, instead, I continue to pound at the code, I start to get sloppy, make mistakes and get more and mo...
With broadband internet being what it is, and tabbed browsing, and the crazy amounts of very entertaining social information sites, and someone down the hall asking for help with the printer (combined with your desire to be useful), and the coder next to you showing everyone clips from comedy central, and the nasty habit of wanting to de...
I work for a small-ish company, 70 people or so, 10 of us are developers. Every month we submit a timesheet tracking the hours spent on the projects we're involved in. Because we leave this until the last minute, we spent up to an hour going through our daily svn commits to reconstruct the hours spent. This is clearly a waste of time, I...
What is a good open-source alternative to Microsoft Project? Mac OS-X or Linux binaries available would be a huge plus. ...
I mean name off a programming project you did and how long it took, please. The boss has never complained but I sometimes feel like things take too long. But this could be because I am impatient as well. Let me know your experiences for comparison. I've also noticed that things always seem to take longer, sometimes much longer, than ori...
At the moment I'm working on a project that has a lot of downtime. It takes 10 minutes to load the development environment, builds can take half an hour, loading the application for debugging sometimes takes 15 minutes. I would like to know what sort of productive work (besides contributing to StackOverflow) people do during these times ...
Where I work, I'm constantly doing development work. We're usually in a position where we're always busy doing development work with no time to write real maintainer documentation. I doubt my position is unique. My question to everyone is, how do you/your development team handle documentation? Do you document as you go? Do you write do...