Archive for August, 2004

Issue Tracking Systems

Monday, August 30th, 2004

One of the students who's going to be working on Hippo this fall sent a message to the group asking for everyone's MSN IDs, so that the team could set up group chats. That got me thinking about how many different ways there are to communicate electronically these days, ...

The Joel Test

Saturday, August 28th, 2004

So, how good is your software team? Joel Spolsky (who runs a company called Fog Creek, and writes a weblog that everyone in the software industry either reads, or ought to) has a 12-question test to help you measure how well your team is doing. How do the student teams hosted on Pyre do? ...

A Summer’s Worth of Links

Wednesday, August 25th, 2004

Well, here they are: this summer's favorite links. http://websavvy-access.org/resources/top_ten.php Accessibility Guidelines web accessibility guidelines http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/brada/APIUsability.pdf APIUsability.pdf usability studies; APIs http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xml03/papers/06-02-01/06-02-01.pdf Circles, Triangles, Rectangles extensible programming; technical articles; programming languages http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/22/118161.aspx Cleaner, more elegant, and wrong programming examples; exceptions ...

Filters, Performance, and Priorities

Wednesday, August 18th, 2004

Where has the summer gone? We've written a lot of software (and documentation), but there's still a lot to do before Helium (er, sorry, Hippo---we're renaming it, for reasons that are too silly to go into) is ready to deploy. Eleven undergraduates from the Department of Computer Science at the ...

Configuration files and dynamic languages

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

A few months ago, Carlos Perez blogged about someone else's claim to have built a mildly complex web app using Ruby in just two months. Perez argued that one reason Ruby-based development was so much faster than Java-based development would have been was: Java web app frameworks typically use lots ...

Real-time Scheduling

Friday, August 6th, 2004

In this blog posting from May 2004, Johanna Rothman talks about how easy it is to build a schedule for a small project using just yellow sticky notes. Back in June, I commented on Roy Osherove's whiteboard-based project management, and asked for links to software tools that were as ...

Poor Cousins

Wednesday, August 4th, 2004

Four weeks left until the summer's work on Hippo (formerly Helium) winds down, and we're starting to run into the 10% of cases that make up 90% of the grief. For example, consider the problem of keeping track of the relationships between users and projects. In SourceForge and other systems, this ...