developer.* Blogs - Refactoring - Comments

Google Video

Steve Benz — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:05:57 -0800

That was quite an interesting talk! At one point the speaker calls out data that seems to conclusively show that, almost all of the time, the committer turns out to be a useless predictor of whether a commit will be buggy or not.

Honestly, I'm not entirely surprised. I think good programmers can be as error prone as bad ones. What I think distinguishes a good programmer from a bad one is the survivability of their code. That is, the good coder will check in reusable components that last in the product, unchanged, for many years. The bad programmer will treat each new challenge as a separate entity and never write much code that is reused. When their code does persist, it's usually because it becomes dead code.

Bugs via SCM

Siddharta Govindaraj — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 19:48:13 -0800

Hi Pat, there was a video on Google video about predicting bugs using source control information. Not sure if its the same one. The video is here.

I detect a self-contradiction

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:40:11 -0800

See my extended post "Squaring the Circle"

similar ideas

Pat Eyler — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:34:57 -0800

In his OSCon 2006 presentation 10 Tools for Open Source Projects, Karl Fogel presented some similar ideas about using tools to evaluate bug reports and repository commits to screen potential commit-bit cendidates or other folks who would be good to groom for a bigger role in an open source project. I can't find any links to his talk right now, but I think it was released as an mp3 somewhere.

Mmmmmm....Globals

Daniel Read — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:30:04 -0700

An excellent post, Jason. You wrote, "If it seems like 'global temptations' lurk everywhere in PHP, it is because they do." Having spent much time programming in pre-.NET Visual Basic, I can relate! PHP, of course, gets a lot of flack for this sort of thing (allowing people to get themselves into trouble, that is), just as Visual Basic always did, and it takes constant effort to promote good practice.

Welcome to developer.*. I look forward to more posts.

Dan

Interesting post

Edward G Nilges — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:34:46 -0700

Interesting! See my blog on Collections, Generics, and the Theory of Sets.