Musings of a Software Development Manager

In a demo today another example of why we really need more unit testing instilled cropped up. One of our senior developers was giving a demo after the first Sprint on a project on an overhead projector. Someone piped up that he should try adding a document to multiple categories. So he agrees OK, selects [...]

I’ve been cruising through the first few chapters of Fit for Developing Software by Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham. It’s a pretty good read as I finally feel like I have a good handle on how to wire Fitnesse to Fixtures and Fixtures to my code. I’m actually really kicking myself a bit because we [...]

Today I stopped bothering to update XPlanner. Part of the Agile method is to “do the simplest thing that works.” XPlanner wasn’t really a simple install, but once I adjusted to the user interface it made at least logical sense. The problem is: I already track my Scrum projects on white boards with sticky notes. [...]

Apparently my assumption that there will eventually be a podcast for every niche is starting to happen. Cocoa Radio is an entertaining podcast devoted to independent Mac software developers developing in Cocoa. So far there’s only a few out there, but the focus is on interviews with independent Mac developers like Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire [...]

I regularly ‘google’ potential hires to see if I can find out any useful information before even getting to a technical screening phone interview. Sometimes you can’t find much of anything on a candidate even a candidate with an unusual name. I don’t read a lot into this but I often wonder about it. If [...]

We’ve been experimenting with one week sprints on two current projects. So far the results have been less then stellar. The teams themselves decided on the one week sprints. In one case they just argued strongly that they could add value within a week and then get rapid feedback from an internal customer. In the [...]

This is a little rendering by yours truly from a current Sprint. Your average 3 year old could probably duplicate this scribbling, or as my daughter refers to it as “scribble-scrabble”. I just hope to add a tiny bit of whimsy to the project.

An old issue came up today when a developer dropped by my office and asked whether he should be putting the jars for his project in the project’s lib directory or loaded into the shared JBoss lib directory. My default response was no, but I’ve gone ahead and thought about it a bit. Based on [...]

After getting XPlanner running late last night on my iBook, I got a chance to try it on my PC at work late this afternoon. After dropping back to MySQL 4.1 instead of MySQL 5.0 the install went pretty cleanly and all of a sudden I could add users to a project and assign them [...]

I got really excited that I was finally going to be able to install XPlanner on my XP laptop for work by pulling down the latest source with subversion, 0.7b2. Unfortunately the results have been eerily similar to the first attempt. Essentially I can never add a person to a project, making it well nigh [...]