Musings of a Software Development Manager

A familiar scenario played out today on one of our Scrum projects. The customer had been thinking about one of the administration screens and how it could be enhanced. The requirements for it had already been baselined for the Sprint, but they were really interested in the new functionality. On this particular project the last [...]

Being a customer of Big Blue can be pretty painful sometimes. We recently learned that IBM has conveniently decided to radically restructure their licensing agreements around Websphere. Their plan to make sure they get all possible revenue is to charge per core on a processor and per processor type. According to our contract they can [...]

One of the minor disappointments of Ruby on Rails: Up and Running was that like so many other texts didn’t get to the testing topics until the last chapter. There reasoning was: We’ve come this far with our Photo Share web application, but we haven’t yet created any tests. In truth, this was deliberate. You [...]

Elizabeth Hendrickson is blogging quite a bit recently which can only be a good thing. In a recent post she takes on the problem with getting all the testing done in a Sprint: The team decided to relieve the pressure on the testers by moving the test effort into the next Sprint. So the features [...]

We’re well into a year of introducing code reviews and I’ve noticed a continued evolution over that year. At first we used no tools, printed out the code ahead of time, and then walked through it with an overhead and a projector in a formal meeting. Then we introduced tools, first Jupiter and then Crucible. [...]

I picked up Ruby on Rails: Up and Running at the local Borders a few weeks back with the intent of forcing myself through a second book length tutorial on Rails. Reasons included: Long ago I learned it always helps to learn things from multiple independent sources, so I wanted to see how someone like [...]

Recently I got asked by two of my developers about what to do with testing private methods. They explained they wanted to test some of their private methods that contain logic. The options they were considering included: Making the private methods public. Extracting out the methods into new classes. As a pragmatic approach, both seemed [...]

You know your web framework is facing some problems when projects like Reasonable Server Faces crop up.

At some point choice is overwhelming. Bruce Tate talks about this in From Java to Ruby: Certain tiers of development may be fairly well established, but others like the web presentation tier, offer a staggering lineup of choices–Struts, JavaServer Faces, WebWork, Tapestry, Rife, Spring Web MVC, and many others. On this tier, the safe choices [...]

I really hate bucket tasks, but I haven’t found a satisfying way to avoid them. We tend to have on every project things like: Defect Resolution 116hrs Update Use Cases 18hrs Update Rules Doc 16hrs My best idea is to leave them off and include them in the slack typically left in a project or [...]