Musings of a Software Development Manager

I had one of those weird cross-over experiences last night when I came across a small note in a post about the history of Java’s origins. Ray Cromwell is quoted as saying:
I program in a language that I would actually call “JetBrains Java” since I find I must drop into Live Templates often to [...]

“I just wish someone in IT could make the calls on technology.”
That was the statement from one of our product managers, having sat through a long testy meeting where technical directions got brought up and debated at length. Testy enough that our architect at one point stated:
“So I’m just a researcher, well then see [...]

I realized today as I was clicking through Dell configurations on workstation class machines with dual or quad core Xeons that I really needed to get my head out of the sand and delegate this. I’m not the world’s expert on all aspects of computer hardware other than I usually have a pretty good [...]

I’ve been looking for a nearby Ruby or Rails conference to attend for the last six months or so, and I finally spotted one this evening on Josh Susser’s blog. Turns out SD Forum is going to be running a weekend Ruby conference April 21st and 22nd. The details are still not all [...]

One of our senior developers is putting together a class mostly based on Head First Java, 2nd Edition. The class will reinforce the basic language concepts for several of our developers who feel they still don’t quite get the point of inheritance or how an inner class works.
The developer explained that he was writing [...]

Monday morning team meetings at 9:00am suck even more. Fortunately after ten weeks of 9am team meetings I’m moving my team meetings back to Tuesday at 10am.
For would be managers who are thinking about running team meetings on a Monday, my advice would be–don’t. A few reasons:

Most people don’t show up to work [...]

Dan Bunea recently posted on doing TDD with a web application. Since I’m currently cobbling together a similar TDD JSF example to use for a seminar in my organization I found Dan’s approach enlightening.
Dan begins at the completely at the front end writing a Selenium test against the initial page of an application where [...]

A rather humorous exchange happened today at a standup:
Developer #1: Well, I worked on getting the Fitnesse tests working, but it turns out I have to use Shale Mock objects to fake all the stuff for JSF, so I’ll be working on it again all day today to hopefully finish.
Developer #2: So, Fitnesse is an [...]

Spent some time watching a screencast by Brian Marrick on Model-View-Presenter instead of Model-View-Controller. It would appear from the screencast that views have everything possible scraped out and popped into the presenter. It uses the Observer pattern and simply fires off events when things like buttons are pressed. The view layer is [...]

Good business customers are a great resource. Today, at a Sprint review meeting, the product owner’s boss explained that she would really like another release planning exercise to determine when the team can deliver, but that she’s not holding anyone to a specific date. Then she followed up with something even better. [...]