Musings of a Software Development Manager

I had a lingering item on one of my lists to look into why our Windows build box runs out of memory after 3-4 days of running cruisecontrol. Turns out it’s a quick uncomment in cruisecontrol.bat: REM Uncomment the following line if you have OutOfMemoryError errors REM set CC_OPTS=-Xms128m -Xmx256m Not sure why it isn’t [...]

I sat my two tech leads down last week and went over a draft of our new code review process. They were OK with the general approach and idea, but they did have two things to add: You’re going to present this to the team. We probably won’t need to do these after a little [...]

In a podcast on Drunk and Retired, they talked a bit about how their seems to be a bit of hand waving about how agile methodologies really scale: Well, like you know, in Scrum, just have a Scrum of Scrums, that’ll work out. –Cote I actually giggled on my morning walk because it was the [...]

In the tradition of code smells here’s some Enterprise Tool Smells: Install time is measured in days. Installation involves cryptic steps such as after step 17c, delete these files, then restart the installation script. The install software doesn’t fit on a single DVD, necessitating baby-sitting it so you can dump the next CD/DVD when it’s [...]

It’s nice to know a big name consultant like Rick Hightower is struggling mightily with Websphere Portal and RAD 6 as well: The loading process is a 15 page document of push this button, push that button, install this, stand on your head, fill out this dialog, sacrifice a goat, scroll this list, repeat, repeat, [...]

I sat down with a consultant our company’s hired the other day and asked about the consultant’s special skill sets. The idea was how they could help mentor/coach my team since just giving them some random coding assignment doesn’t build any lasting capacity. So I asked about the things we need the most help with [...]

Eclipse has a ‘guess the button’ user interface. –James Noble I’m working up some JUnit examples and figuring I’ll just use Eclipse for the example code and labs, but of course big, bad, horrible interface Eclipse nips up and bites me. It is so easy to get lost in the interface in wizard and button [...]

I run a semi-regular development architecture meeting that involves pretty much all of my company’s senior java developers. On the agenda today was how to drive TDD into the development group successfully. Though not unexpected I got lots of the following: Well, if you want us to write lots of unit tests it’s going to [...]

Reading through Ken Pugh’s Prefactoring I came across a mention of the Napkin Look & Feel Toolkit. It appears to be a very slick representation of a swing environment which looks like it could have been scrawled on a napkin. Too bad since we pretty much only do web apps I probably won’t get to [...]

Back in June I went through the pain of trying to make my way through Spring: A Developer’s Notebook. It turns out that Bruce Tate himself admitted that the book was badly done in his Amazon one star review: My appologies to all readers, and O’Reilly customers. I let you down. There’s no other way [...]