I am considering resurrecting an old hobby project of mine, but since my time is limited I am having trouble deciding how to proceed. I already have an extensive backlog of bugs and feature requests that I probably should be doing, but on the other hand there is also a big need for some serious refactoring to make up for old sins. Initi...
In regards to hobby projects, at what point do you consider it to be mature enough to release the first version to the general public? Do you wait until you have all of the features implemented, or do you release it once you have solid functionality and keep working on it? Also, what are some of the differences between releasing a hobby...
High-quality bug reports are essential for effective bug tracking - in an ideal world all bug reports would contain essential information such as which version of the software it affects and a step-by-step description on how to reproduce the bug. In reality, though, bugs reported can vary a lot in quality. They might be on-liners ("feat...
I was recently brought into a company to help them define their overall software development processes. The company's team members were enthusiastic and very open to any practice as long as it would increase productivity and quality. Being a smaller shop, however, they really needed to watch their spending. This ultimately meant they nee...
I've been doing scrum with a team for a while, but things seem messy for whatever reasons. I've been thinking on how they can be changed and have a couple of questions that would like to raise here. First, what should be the role of testers, designers and non-developers as a whole in the scrum process? If they are equal to other team mem...
I find that for most software projects, documentation is often oriented towards the process of development the software, rather than supporting and maintaining it. This is particularly true when using agile methodologies, which emphasize minimalistic documentation. The issue with development-oriented documentation is that it tends to be...
Hi there, Browsing stackoverflow, I noticed a number of posts stating that some developers advocate code review before checkin to MAIN. However, can this really be enforced? And if so, surely it reduces the likelihood of code being refactored due to the increased overhead involved? Personally, I prefer the approach of employing continu...
My dad always says "Responsibility without Authority is meaningless". However, I find that as developers, we get stuck in situations all the time where we are: Responsible for ensuring the software is "bug free", but don't have the authority to implement a bug tracking system Responsible for hitting project deadlines, but can't influe...
Imagine you are implementing the user story containing various new features and adding complexity to the code base. The existing code is quite well covered and you have just decided upon interfaces. You are starting to implement the functionality starting with tests. Now you have fairly complex test cases based on the requirements but ...
What is the single best tactic a developer can use to avoid spending time in meetings? I'm mainly thinking of the seemingly-pointless meetings that (project) managers often schedule, that can be a real barrier to getting real work done. So far, I have had some success with the following techniques, which seem to remove some of the need...
I know there are things like doing manual check to make sure the codes committed is fundamentally correct. But beside that? Reason i asking is because a big project there are so many commits everyday. ...
A beginner question, bear with me: I'm just wondering under what circumstances one should use a build tool like nant or msbuild? I'm working on a medium sized application (.net 3.0), every developer is doing his work and builds on his machine checking his code changes into the repository as he goes. Once we're all done, I'll get all the ...
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 ...
You must have heard the archetypical story of a failing/failed project: A team of inexperienced programmers work 24x7 Bugs are fixed only to introduce new bugs Customer is screaming that he could not even do the basic stuff (Saving/Querying) etc. Programmers used to having the spec handed down struggle to improvise No automated unit te...
I've used a Continuous Integration server in the past with great success, and hadn't had the need to ever perform a code freeze on the source control system. However, lately it seems that everywhere I look, most shops are using the concept of code freezes when preparing for a release, or even a new test version of their product. This i...
Where I work we have this really simple system for working on code. We have our live application servers and a development staging server which exactly duplicates the live environment. Every product/site we have exists in version control (CVS) and to develop, you check out a CVS module to your local machine, edit the code.. commit it bac...
When developing a web application using ASP.NET, do you have any hints about how to separate the development of content/functionality from the design, so that the two can be developed separately and in parallel? The situation is: Customer has agreed on what functionality they want Customer is changing their mind about the appearance (...
Lately I had the idea that a badge system system like stackoverflow's could be applied to trac (or whatever system) to stimulate your developers handle tickets, bugs and so on. The naive approach would be very vulnerable to abuse (obviously). The question is: Is there a system like that is applied in a work process (non-community). It m...
This is really just me soliciting a number of opinions and as a relative newbie to this site, I hope I was correct in marking this post as a community Wiki. If I was mistaken, can someone please correct my mistake. Anyways, here is the scenario. I am developing a web application and a number of services in support of that application....
I'd hope some healthy discussion will come out of this more so than a specific solution so I'll Community Wiki it as it is a fairly subjective topic. Appreciate if it can be left open as a helpful resource. Recently I've taken over as Dev Manager with a small Technical Team. The Business/Marketting/Design Teams out number the technical...