Process and Methodology

When I read the article Daniel referred to in his Apgar score post, and I came away with a different lesson. My central observation was that simply by tracking the Apgar score, doctors and hospitals became more interested in reviving babies that they might previously have diagnosed as stillborn.

I've been scheming and postulating on this project for a couple months. I've created and thrown out several plans on incremental ways to migrate the network to be in a ready state to do this. It has been very difficult to get anything concrete moving. So then a few days ago, I decided to bite the bullet...

It can hardly be said that any serious programmer has had to deal with database programming at least some time in their careers. So it would be logical then to make sure your code to these underlying databases are as efficient as possible. Hopefully I will share some of the best practices I have learned in dealing with ADO.Net programming.

I've also been witness to the birth of vast numbers of RUP artifacts into a corporate project atmosphere of total apathy. Sheaves of use-case diagrams, sequence diagrams, UML versions of the Last Supper--you name it; unread, unused, sent straight to dead-document heaven.

Why do lawyers retain expert witnesses? Why does a general practitioner refer you to a specialist? Do you see a pattern here?

Our jobs, as software developers, are made up of work and not work. The work is the good stuff--writing software, designing architecture, even doing maintenance code. The not work is what kills us.

This an open discussion thread for the developer.* article "The Art in Computer Programming," by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. If you haven't already, you can read it here, then add your comments below.

So, since I was the last person to squawk about how bloody awful our release process was, I pulled the duty without meaning to and definitely without wanting to. Therefore: I, InstallShield Chump.

Anytime I get involved in a position where someone is clamoring for a heavyweight up-front requirements period, or for extensive documentation, or where people immediately start in with "it's not time to talk about code yet," my spider-sense goes off like an H-Bomb....

Often, designing and developing the infrastructure takes more time than the it does for the "first class" parts of the system. Where this really gets us into trouble is in planning and estimation. We forget, when telling our project manager, "That should take about two weeks."