Musings of a Software Development Manager

I’m working on a justification for capable developer machines including dual 24″ monitors. It occurred to me that I needed a simple test to define the problem. def test_two_24_inch_monitors_are_cost_effective baseline_productivity = developer.productivity_in_hours_per_year developer.add_monitor(24_inch_monitor) developer.add_monitor(24_inch_monitor) productivity_gain = developer.productivity_in_hours_per_year – baseline_productivity assert(productivity_gain * 50_dollars_per_hour > cost_of_two_monitors) end So with two 24″ monitors running say $800 I need [...]

Browsing Howard Lewis Ship’s blog I came across a short post on his maven frustrations: I still like the concept of the repository and the transitive dependencies; that aspect of Maven is worthwhile, but as a build tool, it sucks up far more time and energy than it saves. Possibly an order of magnitude more. [...]

About the time you realize UDDI doesn’t buy you that much another question comes up? How do we manage the services? Options include: Put it off because we only have a handful of services? Buy a product or possibly use an open source service repository tool? Setup something informal like a wiki? When you have [...]

One of our testers thought our ESB was broken. “Well, when I send in the payload against our main app it works so how come it throws an error here?” “Because we’re actually validating the SOAP message” “So is this other app.” “Let me show you.” At this point the developer created a quick XML [...]

Due to a peculiar set of circumstances I’m looking at C# coding standards or style guides. The key decision is to agree to a style guide that everyone more or less follows. I also like style guides that go a bit beyond how to format the curly braces on a newline or tabs versus spaces. [...]