It is a sad fact of life that, in this day and age, arguments are not won with sound logic and reasoning. Instead, applying the principle of framing an argument is much more effective at swaying public opinion. So the next time you try to make headway introducing Test Driven Development (or even simply introducing writing automated unit tests at all) into an organization and are rebuffed with... Don’t bring your fancy schmancy flavor of the week agile manifesto infested “methodology” here kiddo. I’ve been writing software my way for a loooong time... You can reply with... ...
In the The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks highlights an eye opening disparity in productivity between good and poor programmers (emphasis mine). Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erickson, and Grant were measuring performance of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between the best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements! Robert Glass cites research that puts this...
I don’t know about you, but every company I’ve ever worked at had a Fort Knox like system in place for deploying code to the production server. Typically, deployment looks something like this (some with more steps, some with less): Grab the labeled (tagged) code from the version control system. Obviously, ensure that the application must compile. Another developer other than the author must review the code on some level and sign off on it. Automated unit tests must pass. If they exist, the automated system and integration tests must pass. The QA team tests the...
We often hear that the current state of software development is still dysfunctional. Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a book to that effect called Dreaming In Code. He takes takes a look at the question Why is software so hard? According to Scott, Software developement’s history is marred by poor quality, missed deadlines, and cost overruns, primarily due to a persistent dysfunctional culture. And he’s talking about software written by companies who are in the business ogf writing software. Well if software written by software companies is so bad, how bad is the software written by hardware companies? Very bad. I’m sure there are a few exceptions,...