Musings of a Software Development Manager

I came across a slightly more detailed explanation of how to write feature titles in FDD, basically: <action><result><object> So an example would be, Add an Item to the Shopping Cart or Calculate Total Registrations for Class. Having just gone through an exercise of planning out some features and estimating ‘story points’ on a project, this [...]

Listening again to a Polymorphic Podcast while I was out strolling around Sacramento at 5am on my morning walk, I heard commentary that struck a chord. The person being interviewed on the show was Kent Alstad, a developer with 20+ years of experience, who’s published a book or two in the .NET space. When asked [...]

It’s always important to take time off, so today I’m off to the beach in San Diego. I may post intermittently depending on wireless accessibility.

As a way of introducing a game, I’ve started to implement planning poker to estimate a Product Backlog, aka feature list, for two of my project teams. The experiments have gone fairly well so far. Basically everyone reviews the list of user stories, use cases, features, or tasks hopefully be then the poker rounds start: [...]

To give credit, I picked up this tip from Elizabeth Hendrickson: To check whether people are actually reading long technical requirements or design documents, liberally sprinkle the text with ridiculous quotes, like “My HoverCraft is Full of Eels.” The basic idea is that very few people actually read long technical documentation. So why do we [...]

While I understand the idea behind leaving out some details in example code in technical books, I just don’t agree with it in general. The reason behind picking up a book on a particular framework, language, or technique is to be able to immerse yourself in some sample code. If the authors opt out by [...]

Just starting to dig into Spring in Action. So far so good until I run into the first example. It’s just a Hello World style example so what could go wrong? First issue crops up when I notice the following line: BeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(new FileInputStream(“hello.xml”)); IntelliJ just keeps barking at me that the [...]

I haven’t written a line of code in about a week at work. Sure I’ve reviewed some code, and made suggestions for developers, but I haven’t typed out any code in about a week now. It seems like management issues keep overwhelming any day to day coding or research. I’m beginning to feel like an [...]

I’d been tooling around looking at CVS hosting options since I’m doing some hobbyist type development with a friend. Turns out in the preface for Spring in Action, one of the authors thanks CVSDude. 2 MB and one account login for free, 200 MB and 5 accounts for $10 bucks a month, sounds about right.

I’ve been catching up with thePolymorphic Podcast. The host, Craig Shoemaker, puts on a development oriented show focused around .NET. At first I figured I’d just sample one show on Unit Testing, get an idea of whether NUnit is really any different. I figured it probably would be too .NET focused and not that interesting. [...]