developer.* Blogs - Process and Methodology - 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.

Storing data in database

kabilan — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:49:41 -0700

Hai,

I did a website in that if i post some information in 2 seperate line, during i view the post it display in single line. Am did this in asp and acess database.

Can you sugges me about this problem.

System relationships

Donna L Davis — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:37:31 -0700

Your post reminded me of a project that has been looming and languishing in our IT department for really years now: System Relationships Diagram. It's not like progress hasn't been made along the way...we've really come quite far in setting up database tables with relationships for the software side of things. Software is profiled, as well users, tagged hardware, locations, departments, etc.

Software is installed on tagged hardware; the hardware is in a certain location, in a certain building, and the user is assigned to a location, so we're able to associate users with software. Then software is associated with servers (database, application, etc) so that if a server goes down, for instance, we can fairly instantly know what software and users are impacted and can generate a System Outage notification to the appropriate people.

Wherein lies the rub is the more complex issue of routers and wiring. Suppose fiber is cut on 5th street which is used to connect this campus to that one. What lies downstream? What is affected by the outage? That's the part we're trying to track now...and initially we're doing it pretty much as you described: through a visual exercise, with the hope of being able to translate it into a database so that we can build onto a sophisticated sort of dashboard that doesn't rely on specialized knowledge to determine impact.

It's amazing how intricate system connectivity can become and how fairly common it is for the "big picture" to reside only in the psyche of selected talented individuals who better hope they don't get hit in the head.

An exercise like you describe can help uncover areas of opportunity for improvement as well as laterally spreading the wealth of knowledge.

Inspiring post, Jason.

Using Close or Cancel

Guest — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:47:15 -0700

Dino Esposito in Programming ASP.NET 2.0 also echoes the author's suggestion about canceling rather than just closing. While Dino doesn't say the remaining records are read before the close occurs, he does say that resources become available much more quickly by using the suggestion.

If you can cache it think first

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 08:10:14 -0700

See my post "Caching Considered Harmful."

Caching....

Terry Cornwell — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:55:41 -0700

If you can cache it then do it. Common lists (Treeview data, Combo Box Selections etc... ). If it doesn't change that often then Cache it on first retrieval (Or lazy load) then use that cache. DB round trips are slow, so if you can stick it away in memory somewhere then do it.

Thats my 2 cents worth anyway.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Rob MacGrogan — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:01:02 -0700

I too am a big fan of code reviews. I've found them especially useful in guiding young or mediocre developers toward better practices. Or even toward guiding intermediate or advanced developers toward even better practices. I myself have recently learned a lot by having some of my own code reviewed by a developer who works in the IT shop at our client.

That said, I typically look at code review as a once in a while thing--something that's it's good to do from time to time, but not something that needs to be done on every piece of code written. Am I alone in this?

Our client actually has a policy that every single code change that a developer makes must always be code reviewed by another developer. I believe that this process is a waste of time, personally. The occasional code review will reveal a bug or a design flaw. Constant code reviews lead to brain death or will be cursory at best. They are certainly very time consuming and would eat up a huge chunk of our schedule if we actually did them diligently (which now they are putting pressure on us to do, even as the already overbooked schedule really starts heating up).

Great story

Edward G Nilges — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 20:38:37 -0700

BillG wasn't a great programmer, but had a complete understanding of the way in which you need to account for everything, including the fact that 1900 had (and 2100 will have, assuming we make it) no Sadie Hawkins day.

But how many bond maturity programs for bonds bought in the 19th century (which still exist) know this?

People have a sense of their lack of worth which was beaten out of them in the early Microsoft culture by diminishing the old sense to a negative value and then building it back up to a larger positive value.

Poor parents in America tell their kids to downsize their expectations, and the father of one rich girl I knew in Seattle regularly called her "dummy". Dave Cutler, the developer of Windows NT, had had a hard childhood and had struggled out of it.

These predamaged souls came to Microsoft for one brief shining moment in the 1980s in which they were called upon to be like Leonard Cohen foresaken almost human.

I'm serious. Microsoft in the 1980s was a subtext of the 1960s in which people said for one brief shining moment that we deserve to do something cool and useful. My observation was that the Microserfs were not as academically qualified as people going to Apple at the same time: state schools as opposed to MIT, in somewhat the same way as, earlier, Tom Watson of IBM recruited salesmen and engineers, who were upon being recruited headed for the American night, ordered them to shape up, and rewarded them for shaping up.

Yet somehow...Douglas Coupland documents their road BACK to the default condition of enserfdom while nobunny writes of the outward bound journey, because it wasn't as sexy as Apple.

BillG was positioned to do this man to man but already, time has moved on.

Today, if even a MANAGER walked into a conference room with a fully marked up document and started firing questions, he'd be met by vacant stares if high enough in the hierarchy or another manager...who takes the position that his concerns are somehow kiss-of-death "academic", that we just need to "get it out the door", ya, de ha ha...would mock the markup guy as a dweeb.

Even if the manager is like Bill a majority owner, he would STILL be subject to exogenous pressures in such a way that resistance would be able to contact board members or venture people and undercut the manager/owner.

The irony is that when BillG was creating something ex nihilo, I allowed some bimbo of a consulting firm executive, in 1979, to tell me that all useful software had been written, for mainframes, and that the software powering embedded devices would use IBM mainframes and their compilers to create binary files for download, period.

I should have told said bimbo to fart in a bottle and paint it, and, a year later, I did. Not only that, on my last day with the firm, knowing she hated smoking, I bought several "nize beeg fat Habana ceegars" and distributed them to the mailroom crew.

"...men will still say, THIS was their finest hour".

[Donna she really was a bimbo she really was, and I am a real feminist guy. Well sort of.]

Unlike Bill Moor I had no habit of surrealist pranks (some of his pranks in Chicago and Berwyn were classic). I had two small children and was deathly afraid of unemployability from 1981 on. Still, man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Managers love it when programmers have lousy tools and struggle with buggy compilers. If management in some embedded or similar context makes you use a lousy language or compiler, write a new one.

Support from the Top

Daniel Read — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:59:24 -0700

Thanks for adding your thoughts, Chris. I agree, in particular, that sustaining reviews and other quality-oriented processes for which it is difficult to perceive the benefit requires a committment from the top. A quality culture, as you put it, probably cannot happen without support from top either. Along these lines, I'm fond of this essay by Joel Spolsky called "My First BillG Review." After telling a great story about Bill Gates reviewing Joel's spec for an early version of what later became VBA, he concludes with some thoughts about the benefits of having a programmer, someone who understands the technical issues and the software culture, running the show.

Thanks again,
Dan

Hard to maintain

chrishmorris — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:18:28 -0700

No, it's not just you, Dan. I'm at an earlier stage in the process, trying to establish review. It's hard to do, for several reasons.

One thing I think we have to register is that there are cultural preconditions before reviews are useful. I once worked with someone who used to work at ICL, a large and now defunct UK computer company. I called a review for some of my code. He said he would come on one condition: that I promise reviews would not become mandatory. At ICL they were compulsory, and were, he said, a waste of time. This is all too easy to imagine.

When people resist reviews, it's because they don't feel they will be useful. This may be because they don't know the benefits. But they may also be right. I agree with everything you said about the potential benefits, but I think it needs a very high level of maturity.

I plain don't think that this level can be acheived bottom-up. So I don't think any coder or team leader should feel bad that they cannot sustain code review. It needs support from the top, and a thoroughgoing quality culture.

But do they?

Chris Gaskell — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:34:20 -0700

I understand where you are coming from on this, but do you include columns such as 'DateCreated' and 'LastModified' in your business DTO's?

Chris Gaskell, .NET & Web development Enthusiast

Apologies

Chris Gaskell — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:31:59 -0700

It seems my definition of a dynamic SQL query hasn't come across as I intended. Please see my example of a dynamic query below (I think you will find this matches your descripiton of a static query)

sql = @"SELECT Col1, Col2 FROM table WHERE id=" + id;

Thanks,

Chris Gaskell, .NET & Web development Enthusiast