Archive for June, 2004
Wednesday, June 30th, 2004
Michael Swanson has posted an article about continuous integration, which covers much of the same material as Mike Clark's new book on project automation. The idea is a simple one: every 15 minutes (or hour, or whatever), an automated process checks out a clean copy of the project source, ...
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Sunday, June 27th, 2004
Kanglin Li and Mengqi Wu: Effective Software Test Automation.
Sybex, 2004, 0782143202, 408 pages.
One of the most important features of the "New Standard Model" of
programming is its emphasis on unit testing. Just five years after
the first version of JUnit was written, an ever-increasing number of
programmers actually create and run tests ...
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Sunday, June 27th, 2004
Mike Gunderloy: Coder to Developer. Sybex, 2004, 078214327X, 297 pages.
When I was a young lad, there weren't many books that would teach you
how to program. Oh, there were plenty that talked about this
language, or that algorithm, but if you wanted to learn the mechanics
of developing software that worked, ...
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Sunday, June 27th, 2004
Joe Walnes, Ara Abrahamian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, and Pat Lightbody:
Java Open Source Programming. Wiley, 2004, 0471463620, 459 pages.
In physics, the Standard Model is today's baseline explanation of How
It All Works. It encompasses quarks, leptons, force-carrying
particles---pretty much everything except gravity. From subatomic
physics to cosmology, practically everyone builds their theory ...
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Sunday, June 27th, 2004
Michelle Levesque recently posted about her discovery that scripting the existing partial implementation of Helium would help her develop the rest of it. Scriptability is actually one of the system's must-have features: instructors must be able to create accounts and projects by the dozens, to assign people to groups ...
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Saturday, June 26th, 2004
People talk about code reviews far more often than they do them, despite the fact that everyone (reviewers and coders alike) seems to get a lot out of them. We've been talking about implementing code reviews in my real job for almost four years, but have never actually gotten ...
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Saturday, June 26th, 2004
Among other Helium tasks, I've working on has been some rough screenshots of what our web interface might end up looking like. What I've found interesting about the very high-level design process, is that I kept needing to go lower and lower in order to make the design steps easier. ...
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Friday, June 25th, 2004
One of the blogs I read (can't remember which) said a couple of weeks
ago that almost all of the programming productivity gains we ascribe
to OO are in fact due to memory management and reflection. The first
stops average programmers from doing stupid things; the second allows good
ones to do amazing ...
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Friday, June 25th, 2004
Many books describe how to get a project rolling. Unfortunately, none of their descriptions match anything I've ever seen in the real world. For example, Rosenberg and Scott's Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML tells readers to write use cases (actor X does Y to achieve result ...
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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
Roy Osherove posted a description of his team's whiteboard-based project management technique. Like most "agile" technologies, it won't scale to large teams, or long-lived projects, but that isn't the space Helium is aimed at. I'd be grateful for links to web-based project tracking and management tools that ...
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