Finding better ways of developing software
When there are more, than one programmer on the project, the work has to be divided somehow. Agile methodologies propose self-organized team to decide who is doing what, more traditional waterfall approaches propose that manager allocates tasks to the guys with the free time slots. Whatever the method is, there is one more thing to consider: who is allowed to make changes where.
It is quite often that particular modules are "owned" by particular people and only they are allowed to make reasonable changes there. Usual argument is "The person, who doesn't know the module, can unintentionally break it".
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One concrete tip about from the seminar discussion: If you are unsure about the platform features, create a test for it.
One of the topics discussed was Test Driven Development (TDD). It is the software development method, when programmer first creates the unit test for the new functionality and only then implements it. I had the concern about the unknown platform capabilities. It happens so, that I and my colleagues often work on fresh betas of the coming software platforms that don't have all the new features documented or even implemented. Therefore quite often I don't have a concrete plan in mind. I try using one feature and another until I find a way that satisfies the original requirements somehow. Of course, these feature trials tend to become the release code and it's mentally difficult to write a unit test after the code - after all this way it is not TDD anymore.
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Last week I was attending the seminar on Agile SW Development Practices in Vantaa (
Agenda in pdf).The seminar was very nice with a lot of speakers, talking about their own very practical experience in agile-related SW development. Most probably I'll highlight several seminar topics in the coming posts.
At the moment I can present my main impression: all the agile methods are about is truth and visibility. Don't lie to yourself; don't overplan, what you are not going to implement; don't pretend the project is 95% ready, if you are expecting endless bugfixes and don't hide the current situation from your customers. That's it. All the remaining details are about how to implement these principles in practice. I.e. how often and in which terms to report to customers so that they understood you and weren't overloaded with the unnecessary details, how to prevent yourself from overplanning, etc.
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SymbianExample.com is eventually up and running. It took quite some time to restart it, but I am very much pleased with the results. It is build on the Drupal CMS 4.7 Beta 4. As it is still beta, I disabled comments - they work ok, but display error-like messages, when you post. They will be enabled whenever Drupal community releases the next Beta or RC of the 4.7 (sometime in February)
Nevertheless, the site looks great (as for me) and I am extremely pleased with the customization possibilities, to be enabled one by one in the close future.
And by the way.
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Today I've spent several hours trying to locate a simple example for the Nokia's Series 60 3rd edition. And miserably failed.
At the moment I am developing my first 3rd edition application. It is also the first app, where I am going to use vector icons in the svg format (introduced in Series 60 2nd edition Feature Pack 3). Somehow in all my previous projects I did the non-UI components only and never bothered about the application wrap-up.
Today in the morning I found that even though I have access to a lot of 3rd edition applications, I don't have a single simple example. As you might guess the attempts to "intelligently copy" the existing code failed.
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On Joel's Multitasking in the Workplace
Multitasking in the Workplace:
Joel Spolsky, a known writer on software development related topics is a long standing advocate of private offices for every developer, perfect working conditions and managers whose main role is to “move furniture out of the way, so people can concentrate on their workâ€Â. Lately he found the support in the published in the NY Times research report claiming that in the cubicle space people loose hell a lot of time on interruptions. I believe that there is a proven way to unite the advantages of the open-space communication and private office focus.
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www.SymbianExample.com is up and running. In perfect accordance to the Agile Manifesto's "Working software over comprehensive documentation", design is far from perfect, e-mail is not functioning, no forum installed, but it is up and running. You can already find there a launcher of ExeDll projects and sample code for global key capturing (including a tricky case of long key press capturing).
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On the 7th of September I was visiting the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, where the Second Agile Finland seminar was hosted.
The popularity of the Agile methods among the software developers is growing all over the world. My first university degree was focused on the ways of constructing large software systems. So I've been always curious about different trends in the design methodologies. I could not miss a chance to discover more about this area.
The presentations were very impressive. What particularly excited me was the great amount of statistical and historical background presented by Craig Larman from Valtech. You all know, that "waterfall" is a devastating way to go. It was amazing to discover, that it was considered harmful from the very first time it was mentioned (!). But not so many readers of the article, where the waterfall was introduced and thoroughly described bothered themselves to read to the part, where it was criticized and iterative methods were offered instead.
2nd and 3rd presentations were devoted to the success stories about using Scrum methodology - lightweight iterative way to design software. It proved to be really simple, controllable and effective.
If you want to improve the software development at your company, have a look at Scrum. I will definitely try using some elements of it - its backlog and burndown chart seem to be very simple and at the same time effective and even fun tools to use.
Craig Larman starting the seminar
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