Software As She’s Developed

Alistair Cockburn gave a 75 minute keynote on the game-playing model of software development. Software is like Calvinball - you never play the same game with the same rules twice. (Calvinball is apparently based on the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, where the characters improvise on the rules as they play the game. This was actually a […]

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Romilly Cocking gave a 75-minute presentation about his work at BNP Paribas, using agile techniques to implement a reconciliation engine. Unusually for a bank, it’s fine with this information being public and Romilly said it would be fine to write about it here. The Reconciliation Problem Reconciliation: Comparing and contrasting two sets of records that should tell the […]

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Michael Feathers of ObjectMentor led a three-hour workshop, “Coaching Software Development Teams”. If you’re after a quick fix, jump straight to Michael’s patterns below. The Nature of Coaching Discussion prompted by definition of coaching as causing change. Coaching in the business community is more about fostering change, like counselling - don’t have to have the business knowledge. […]

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Benedict overviewed the basics of Java annotations in a 75-minute tutorial. I was looking forward to this as I attended his Tiger session last year and it was a spot-on summary of all the main points. This tutorial likewise. Many different types of comments Including: Historical info State of code (e.g. TODOs, bug notes) Behavioural expectations (assumptions) Environment requirements Algorithm descriptions. Annotations are […]

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I attended SPA 2005 earlier this week and tapped in some session notes while I was there. I’ll be posting each one in its own entry, coming up. As promised to workshop attendees, I’ll also be posting the slides for my workshop on writing self-documenting software. SPA is a BCS group which describes its concerns as […]

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Amazon has a couldabeen-great feature that lets you focus on a particular reviewer and see all their reviews. So you could, for instance, see what the alpha reviewers - those in the top 10 are saying. However, it’s a bit pointless because there’s no support for wading through the hundreds of reviews each of these guys […]

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Chris Stevenson discusses some pitfalls in testing with random numbers. Here’s my advice on unit testing with random numbers: best avoid it and certainly don’t tie yourself to it. I’ll explain the flexibility part below. But First, let’s be clear on randomness. As Chris alludes to, random numbers in most programming environments are actually pseudo-random. Math.random() says: […]

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Let’s say I’m coding in exploration (or “spike”) mode. Just tinkering a bit, playing around with some ideas. Or maybe experimenting with some new technologies. So it’s quite likely I’ll be downloading and installing some libraries. And I don’t want it to distract me … it should be as transparent as possible. Even savvy IDEs offer […]

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ITunes has two serious usability bloopers in its handling of the music database. Duplicate songs It’s very possible you’ll end up with the same song twice. Perhaps you forgot you’d already imported it. I’ve been having problems with IPodder pushing songs into ITunes , so I’ve been manually dragging results of a Recent Files query, leading to […]

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If you shop at Amazon.co.uk, you’re often out of luck when it comes to reader comments. So I often find myself editing the URL, switching back and forth between .co.uk and .com. Luckily, this transatlantic adventure usually works out, as the crazy Amazon IDs match. Still, I can’t help thinking Amazon ought to drop in comments […]

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