Musings of a Software Development Manager

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers:

All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily.
Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant)
All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson)
All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards.
Unit test coverage of [...]

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 [...]

Denis over at One Brike At a Time recently expressed frustration at having to use low trust practices:

It used to be that I did not care much for defensive programming outside of a system’s boundaries. It used to be that I did not really care or believed in strict source control (as in authorise only [...]

Reading through some old documentation today written up a few years ago by our Agile coach I came across a suggested rule of thumb for code reviews:

If more than X lines of code changed in a file then do a full code review of the file.
If less than X lines of code changed you can [...]

Carl Quinn, a development manager at Google and a member of the Java Posse, mentioned that he spent about 50% of his time on code reviews. Google even has a special code review tool, Mondrian, developed by Guido van Rossum. The features are similar to Crucible.
Google’s warm embrace of lightweight code reviews sets [...]

I’m not sure anyone else will find this of much use, but the following is a list of tools, frameworks and libraries we use currently:
Java Frameworks

JSF 1.0
MyFaces
AJAX Anywhere
Spring
Hibernate
iBATIS
JUnit
EasyMock
Log4J
JODA Time
Struts (Though just for one 3rd party app and some older applications)

Tools

RAD 6.0 (We’re a Websphere shop these days)
IntelliJ IDEA ( Was the editor of choice before [...]

Over the weekend I upgraded Crucible, our code review tool, to the 0.9 release. Looks like it’s nearing 1.0 readiness. When I upgraded it on Saturday night I noticed they fixed an annoying bug where you couldn’t just delete a review. We had a few test reviews in the system that we [...]

Many of the practices I’ve introduced to my team have largely stayed within my team. There’s no moat around our section of cubicle land, and all the other teams knew about the majority of our practices, but we didn’t see any uptake. I hoped about a year ago when I ran a TDD [...]

As a bonus Xmas gift this week, I completed my part of a code review of a developer’s code before heading out Friday. The code review primarily covered a JSF backing bean/controller and a corresponding test case. Even though the tests had mostly been written after the test case was just a joy [...]

Peter Moore from Cenqua Software stopped by for a customer visit late last week. Turns out he’s in the Bay area for a few months and Sacramento is just a short jaunt down the road.
We’ve been beta testing Crucible, their code review tool, since June. We’re pretty happy with it as it fits [...]