I believe that Agile is nothing but another implementation of Spiral Model. I am a big supporter of Spiral (The spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-in-stages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts) since its beginnings and have seen that lot of p...
Dogfooding is using your own software while it is being developed. Sometimes it is impossible to simple use it at all (e.g. software for fighter pilots.) More often it is possible to dogfood, but it doesn't happen anyway. A couple of "Our users won't experience that problem so it can't be a dogfooding bug," and quickly the practical...
Not to be too defeatist ... ... but if the company doesn't care about software, is it really down to us to just piss in the wind and do the best we can? I've read answers here that mention convincing managment about the bottom line benefit of good software development practice, but when the boss won't even buy a 20 dollar book on the ...
At $work, we've recently (as in three or four years ago now) split our development organisation in two (but not half): one group to develop the Next Big Thing (NBT), and the other group to handle customer-reported problems, diagnose them, and check in the fixes for the regularly-scheduled patches (development support, or DS). And the se...
Hi, Many of you must have been part of team which successfully launched products. What lessons you learned? Is there good literature out there which I can read? I was just reading this wonderful article, http://productmusings.wordpress.com/2006/11/05/20-rules-for-delivering-software-products/. And one point I really liked was "Make sure...
What are certain signs to pursue or discard a business idea? ...
I came across this article about programming styles, seen by Edsger Dijsktra. To quickly paraphrase, the main difference is Mozart attempted to figure everything out in his head before writing anything, while Beethoven made his decisions as he wrote the notes out on paper, creating many revisions along the way. With Mozart programming, v...
Hi, What are the basic steps for Agile software development? And how you start a new project with agile methodology? ...
I am sure there are many developers out here who have team spread across different time zones. What are some of the challenges people face and whats the best way to tackle them? ...
I'm not looking for a general discussion on if math is important or not for programming. Instead I'm looking for real world scenarios where you have actually used some branch of math to solve some particular problem during your career as a software developer. In particular, I'm looking for concrete examples. ...
I was watching something on TV the other day and sat in disbelief as someone said something to the effect of, "I wish we could round up all of the people who made mistakes and punish them." That statement floored me. Punishing malevolence is one thing (preferably by immediate dismissal), but punishing mistakes? How is one to learn? Doesn...
Do you use UML o or a domain specific modelling language(DSML)? Do you make up your own modelling language? (A DSML) Does it help getting code written? Do you use them for code generation (or are they otherwise runnable )? Do you use them to make pictures of your system (or do you draw them directly)? ...
Back in college, only the use of pseudo code was evangelized more than OOP in my curriculum. Just like commenting (and other preached 'best practices'), I found that in crunch time psuedocode was often neglected. So my question is...who actually uses it a lot of the time? Or do you only use it when an algorithm is really hard to conceptu...
I am a big fan of agile software development which include code-reviews,testing extensively. But my question who should be ACTUALLY TESTING the code. Is it the developer, who wrote it from scratch and who by the way writes test cases(just like me) for each feature he/she rolls out? Or a dedicated tester, who didn't touch(code) the featur...
For me, CRUD apps reduce me to tears of boredom. Same with web apps. What I really enjoy are physics simulations, especially astrodynamics and sound/music synthesis. What about you? ...
I have been a SW developer for some 10 years, and then I was promoted to a Management position for the last 3 years. Not quite happy with my Management role, I looked for job alternatives, and accepted a software development position in a small company. In short, in my new role I will be responsible for SW architecture decisions, lead o...
I work on a project that uses multiple open source Java libraries. When upgrades to those libraries come out, we tend to follow a conservative strategy: if it ain't broke, don't fix it if it doesn't have new features we want, ignore it We follow this strategy because we usually don't have time to put in the new library and thoroughl...
Do you think it may be OK for a person to have more than one role in a software development company that wants to use SCRUM? E.g. is it ok/possible if a person is SCRUM master and team member Product owner and team member SCRUM master and product owner Which combinations do you think are possible? Do you work in such a team? What sh...
In my analysis of the newer web platforms/applications, such as Drupal, Wordpress, and Salesforce, many of them create their software based on the concept of modularization: Where developers can create new extensions and applications without needing to change code in the "core" system maintained by the lead developers. In particular, I ...
Hello, I'm an experienced .NET developer (c#/vb.net) (since beta) and I wanted to start checking out how to develop applications for Linux. I have done some Java programming as well. I have Ubuntu 8.10 Linux and was wondering what everyone was using as a tool for developing applications (for any Linux flavor) - is Java the best way to...