Musings of a Software Development Manager

Running through a recent code review on an outsourced internal project I came across a new issue. The developers have built a few SharePoint Web Parts in using ASP.NET. I gently asked where the unit tests where since I’d dug around in source code and not seen any. The developers looked a little surprised and [...]

As a developer you get the occasional fire drill where some application is crashing at 3 am and you walk into a mess at 7 in the morning. You had expected to spend the day adding that cool new feature, but now you’re digging through reams of log files and looking at environmental issues. Imagine [...]

Saturday 1:15 Build Broken 1:22 Build Broken 1:46 Build Fixed Sunday 9:18 Build Broken 9:26 Build Fixed Active healthy projects have a rhythm. The scenarios look like: The project rarely has any active development. Broken builds are a complete surprise. If you know someone is coding on it, you need to quickly provide some feedback [...]

Automated testing is one of the most important parts of software development, and yet until now, we haven’t mentioned it. Testing a piece of software relies on a thorough understanding of the tools you are using, and designing tests can be far more difficult (and enjoyable) than writing the code itself. – Head First Rails [...]

Say No. This is your second most powerful tool. Whether you’re a manager, considering management, or just here for the Rands, I want you to pick the hardest problem on your plate. The one that is waking you up at 4am. I want you to decide and to say out loud: “No.” You’re not going [...]

My best experience with source control trees have been in shops that didn’t have them to start with. At that point you have a blank slate and you can do a reasonable job of organization. The ones where they used to have VSS and migrated into CVS and then Clearcase are generally just a mess. [...]

After one of those weeks where emergency after emergency cropped up between meetings I let my inbox get out of hand and left emails sitting in them as todo items. I’ve been a GTD follower for about 5 years now and I start to really feel out of control when my inbox is piling up. [...]

Some recent signs of continuous testing coming to Java land: Grails 1.1 features 9 new features including #9 Continuous Testing. Kent Beck is developing JUnit Max an Eclipse plug-in that runs tests in the background optimizing for the tests that are most likely to break. Autotest was a joy to use when I got to [...]

Audits are easy to pass. You have a documented process. You have a pile of documentation that shows that you followed the process. An auditor independently validates the documentation. Much like running your suite of tests on a CI server. In an average IT shop you may even have audits of your software process. Recently [...]