Contents tagged with Software Engineering
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Presenting at The Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) camp held at Trinity College (Hartford CT) on July 2nd.
I am presenting at The Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) Summer Institute at Trinity College (Hartford CT) on July 2nd. The H-FOSS Project is primarily for undergraduate computing students who want to get involved in building free and open source software for use by humanitarian organizations. Details below:
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Chris Bowen at Connecticut .NET Dev Group - 26th Sept
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Agile Does Not Scale Very Well - a response
Paul Gielens has a thought-provoking posting on 'Agile Does Not Scale Very Well'. I posted a response to it but here it is again -
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If only Open Source came with Open Minds...
I picked up the lead on this one via Bruce Hopkins who pointed out to an interesting post by Shaun Walker - No Respect for Windows Open Source.
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CMM-SEI & MSF 4 with VSTS (blogs)
With the advent of VSTS2K5 and MSF 4 integration, there will be renewed interest in CMM-SEI. MSF Formal has been renamed to MSF for CMMI. Having worked with CMM L-4 projects, I can see the importance of it in enterprise settings. Some related blogs covering this aspect (pun intended) of development are - Rick LaPlante, David Anderson & Adam Gallant and of course, Rob Caron always has the pulse of VSTS and Software Engineering.
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The Future of Software Development - series by Ralf Westphal
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Importance of Code Reviews with tools and why it should be a 'peer review'.
I got this link to the SSW Code Auditor via DataGrid Girl. I was reminded of a 'Code Review' enigma about a year ago in a client's .NET project. One of the development-leads of the project insisted on a code-review which was fine with me but his fixation with 'get/set' property mechanisms and naming conventions bordered on nit-picking and I couldn't review his code. Furthermore, his reluctance in using tools like FxCop or even looking into 'refactoring' for efficiency was very questionable (but understandable as his code would have to get beaten up by the tools).
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Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development, Beta
I got this via Eli Robillard's posting - Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development, Beta.
It is encouraging to see the MSF mature rapidly (and to meet the upcoming VS2K5 Team System).
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MS Bashing - when definitely not to do it
Chris Garrett has a very reactive post to ThreadWatch's MS bashing. I concur with Chris - a website that professes to be "less noise, more signal" is certainly not using the Dolby System to lessen their noise about Microsoft. There is nothing more debilitating than listening to MS Bashing at work when you are developing .NET applications! About 2 years ago, I had encountered a tech lead (manager) whose constant MS Bashing at the start of every morning and opportunity was most demoralizing to the team members who were making a living with the .NET technologies. I saw that as very poor management and deplorably weak leadership that sapped motivation and was counter-productive.
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More on Joel Spolsky's College Advice
Jon Galloway's posting on why 'Joel got it wrong' has made me rethink Joel's College Advice. I had added to Joel's advice earlier on but I too don't think that 'C' in particular, is the correct choice. The emphasis really must be on *'Data structures and Algorithms' . Why? The most critical CS course, in my opinion, is *DS-A. Usually, this is a sophmore course in college and taught after a course or two of structured language programming (these may be Pascal, Java, C# or even C/C++). The *DS-A course is the foundation and a pre-requisite for most other CS courses - compilers, databases, networks, automata, etc.
If a student is very familiar with Pascal, Java or C then getting into another structured language is almost trivial (quite a few C++ programmers claim that they got into Java/C# over a week-end).
So, in terms of 'College Advice' - I would recommend taking a *DS-A course (and the near-mastery of a structured language would be presumed). *DS-A courses make better programmers (eventually better developers & architects) who go on to write systems with fewer bugs and thus, obviating the need for bug-tracking tools. ;-)
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