Musings of a Software Development Manager

Sometimes your inadequacies hit you over your head. I got a call on my cell phone about 4:00 today. The developer on the other end asked if there was anything for him to do. I had to answer no, and I’m fighting so many fires I don’t have time to stop and help him figure [...]

Once again this development anti-pattern reared up and bit me. I lost the good part of an afternoon because I didn’t get around to insisting that every project be build-able from it’s ant build script in any environment. The problem all started at lunchtime. Pretty much my entire development team is in some sort of [...]

We’re running a training course on RAD 6.0, IBM’s Eclipse 3.0 based IDE. I still can’t bring myself to install it, but since we have to use it for some portal and BPEL functions we figured it made some sense to get some baseline training for the developers. The trainer seems to be pretty good, [...]

I’ve heard the spiel about turning down bad clients from professional services firms I’ve worked for, but I’ve never seen it actually happen. I came across a post from a ThoughtWorker where they actually walked away from a paying client that was ignoring their advice and forcing them to work in a waterfall approach. This [...]

One of the most frustrating things with legacy applications is the difficulty of harnessing them into test frameworks. Often they’re tightly coupled and it’s difficult to deal with. Usually if you’re just going in for a single bug fix it isn’t worth the effort of trying to put a unit test in. From now on [...]

Only 1 day into the new Cruisecontrol across all the developer projects. By 8:30 this morning I had two programmers standing in my office asking why they were getting these emails from ChickenLittle. ChickenLittle is the name of our build server, the idea’s borrowed from ShipIt! They were fine once I gave them a 5 [...]

Today, I finally got around to sitting down with one of my senior developers and adding all of our current projects into Cruisecontrol. For the last month or so I’ve only been running one project on the automated build. But I freed up some time today and added our other two projects in about 30 [...]

I’ll be launching a small project soon to remove the last dependency on a certain unnamed enterprise tool my company purchased years ago for a few hundred thousand dollars. It has the cost benefit analysis every business person could love. For a week or two of one developers time we can save 50k a year [...]

I started my first ever iterative project with a very complete exhaustive requirements iteration, then a design and prototying iteration, and then three iterations where we delivered code, then a system test iteration, and finally a deployment iteration. Booyah! My first iterative project! At the end I looked back and felt pretty much like other [...]

It occurred to me that if JSF is starting to see a lot of adoption, that there’s probably some testing framework for it, possibly to mock up things like FacesContext. Sadly it doesn’t appear as though there is much thought given to how to test JSF even though testing GUIs has been a pain point [...]