Musings of a Software Development Manager

I read Larry Osterman’s post on Measuring Testers by Test Metrics Doesn’t via The Best Software Writing Vol I. It reminded me of a failed experience from about a year ago on a death march project. The scenario was simple enough. Our large project had been underway for 2.5 years and had been in defect [...]

Howard van Rooijen recently posted about a thread on the Scrum users group. In the thread by Ken Schwaber explains that: I’ve been following the threads about type N, A, B, C and advanced Scrum. Although these may represent the engineering, personnel, and product management practices that an organization adopts as a result of Scrum’s [...]

I’ve been running weekly 30 minute one-on-ones with all of my team for about two months now. With these meetings in place I go no longer than one week between giving and getting feedback from each employee. Doesn’t sound like much. Like most managers I assumed I probably talked to all of my staff every [...]

Crucible, a code review tool from fine folks at Cenqua, is finally closing in on a real beta release. (Disclaimer we’re already use Cenqua’s Clover product.) I talked to Brendan from Cenqua at SD West 2006, and he explained that Crucible was supposed to be Cenqua’s second project after Clover. Turns out Fisheye was a [...]

Walk before you run. So even in a TDD framework approach like Rails the concept of TDD is only approached and explained on page 169 of Agile Web Development with Rails. And even in a chapter on testing we begin with writing functional database style unit tests, and then functional style tests against the controllers. [...]

We held our second code review this Friday. Two months between holding code reviews is a little long, but we’re still working out the process. Some things to remember for next time: Prepare for the code review ahead of time. This code review was being held towards the end of the Sprint, so the afternoon [...]

Richard Monson-Haefel blogs about looking into JSF. Some of his comments include: “It really seems complicated to me in terms of configuration, debugging, and such things.” “JSF strikes me as an over-engineered solution that meets the needs of a small percentage of enterprise web sites.” Appears to be seeing JSF for what it is right [...]

Methods and Tools online magazine ran an actual poll on TDD within software organizations. The poll had 460 total votes. The poll asked the question how is unit testing performed at your location? So TDD adoption is still slow going, which has been my anecdotal experience as well. The nice thing is if you can [...]

On many of our Sprints on various Scrum projects a curious burst of productivity takes place. Without warning many tasks like the following are suddenly completed: Document the migration process. Fix defects. Research indexed search options. Generally most of these tasks were either not even started or had been in progress for most of the [...]

Ran into a minor inconvenience going through Agile Web Development with Rails. Running the command: rake appdoc Results in the following error: rm -r doc/app unrecognized option `–line numbers — inline-source’ For help on options, try ‘rdoc –help’ rake aborted! exit Didn’t take to long to find the source of the bug. Just change one [...]