May « 2006 « Musings of a Software Development Manager

Climbing the Hill of Higher Quality Software Development

Some signs we’re cruising up the hill:

Another team of developers on an Aigle project, none of whom report to me, are writing unit tests. Even without much support they’ve plunged ahead and they’re making progress. The best part is one of the developers is very good, but also very skeptical of new practices. His [...]

RSpec Updated

Playing around with RSpec again recently I noticed its undergone some major development in the past month or so. The web site has been built out quite a bit and the API has become less test like and uses the keywords

1context

and

1specify

to organize things.

Eliminating Front-Line Technical Managers

Cory Foy posted a thought provoking comment to my post on Grooming Technical Managers:

One of the interesting discussions I had when I came on board at my current job was with the XP Coach. Part of bringing on XP at the company was that he convinced them to do away with the front-line technical [...]

Grooming Technical Managers

My manager mentioned a common difficulty to me at our last one-on-one meeting:

“You don’t want to make role of a manager appear too frustrating or you can’t find anybody willing to take it. And since senior developers can often make as much or more than their managers you have the problem that no one [...]

Incremental Agile

In Practices of an Agile Developer, Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt layout how a technical manager might incrementally introduce Agile practices. There suggested list is:

Introduce Agile ideas Setup standup meetings Bring architects into the fold Start informal code reviews Add version control Add unit testing Add build automation

I can vouch for most of [...]

98% Test Coverage

Some days the plans come together. I’ve been pushing hard to implement TDD, code reviews, and continuous integration for at least a year now. Today I helped one of my developers setup Clover to exclude the one package of generated code that didn’t have or need many tests. This is a pretty small code base, [...]

Right-Click Coding or Clickety Click Coding

Cote, now of Redmonk, has a recent post describing what I call Clickety Click Coding and he refers to as Right-Click Coding:

I’ve never been one for model, tool, or drag-and-drop based development. Oracle development, at least as presented to us and as illustrated in the hands-on-lab (where we actually coded up EJBs and Web [...]

SACJUG May Meeting

I attended the SACJUG meeting tonight. They sometimes have a rough time rounding up speakers, and tonight was no exception. They had a talk lined up on AJAX, but their presenter bailed for a consulting job in LA. So we had a roundtable discussion for several hours.

As Ted Neward is still loosely associated with [...]

Finally Tried Out ScrumWorks

I’ve been getting by with just Excel and a large cork board for tracking the one Scrum project I use. Still as a tool junkie and a hater of Excel in general I finally got around to trying out ScrumWorks.

So so far:

Download and install cycle is pretty short and it just worked including [...]

Simplicity over Complexity

Having read at least one and a half of Richard Monson-Haefel’s tomes I’m impressed that that he’s come around to the painful complexity that is J2EE:

Over the years however, EJB and its super set, J2EE, became increasingly complex until there was so much information it was difficult if not impossible to swallow. Today I’m [...]

Musings of a Software Development Manager