Dec 31, 2008 1
I just read Scott Bellware’s Productivity: It Comes from Software Design Rather than Software Tools. These bullet points — the core of his argument — are excellent (quoted here): Design quality is the most important factor influencing productivity in software development The things that obstruct quality degrade productivity The reductions in productivity over time that [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 31, 2008 2
Yesterday I posted twenty reasons to do code reviews, and I promised a list of code review tools. Here they are, in no particular order. I have not used all of them, so I can’t comment on their relative merits. If there are some I missed, please leave a comment and I’ll update this list. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 30, 2008 2
Update [2008-12-31]: I posted the list of code review tools as promised below. I tweeted this article on Five Reasons to Do Code Reviews from CIO.com last week,and realized that there are much more than the five reasons they give. So I came up with 20 more over the rest of the day. This is [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 24, 2008 2
Great post on the cost of (not) testing software. The take-home lesson is “find defects early”. The main thing missing from the discussion is that there are better techniques for finding defects than testing. Like design and code reviews, and especially more attention to requirements. Catch defects as early as possible and reduce costs even [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 18, 2008 3
Saw this post over at the Project Team Blog Our Projects Are Always Late. Newshirt asks (I’m paraphrasing) “Why would this person not use a time tracking tool?” Two answers: Because it feels like an extra step. If you want to change a behavior like time tracking, you have to make it automatic. Developers and [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 15, 2008 0
Here are five reasons you should wait before moving on to the next phase of your software development process: Get the requirements right. It’s so often repeated that it’s almost a cliché to say that requirements errors will cost 10x or more to fix during coding or testing. But it’s true, so I can risk [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 10, 2008 0
Joel Spolsky also thinks that using timelog data for performance tracking is a bad idea.
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 9, 2008 0
Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software has a brilliant blog. His post on QA vs. QC is something I’ve talked about in the past. I love his example of the Pringles manufacturing line discarding off-color chips — it’s a concrete, understandable way to define the difference between QA and QC. Some of my best project [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Dec 8, 2008 0
I just finished the time tracking application for Bale. This is a tool that is key to many other practices, but is very underutilized. (I wonder if this is because so many developers are worried about Big Brother type intrusions into their working habits? See below for why Big Brother is such a bad idea. [...]
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From The Peanut Gallery