I started my professional life in a company where I was the main force pushing for unit testing. Years later I worked in a company where TDD and Pair programming was the strict norm. Today I work in Continuum where we occasionally practice pair prog…
The U.S. Is Outsourcing Away Its Competitive Edge is an interesting article. I'm not a business person (yet!) so I won't comment on the core message of the article. But this argument resonated on me: “In many cases, R&D and manufacturing are tight…
This is my humble recognition of memcached (“a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system”) usefulness. It is not a language or platform dependent tool, so do not overlook it just because I tend to talk about Python or Java. Last we…
Today I had a happy surprise. In a discussion on a local linux related mailing list, someone pointed to Review Board as a good alternative for doing code reviews. I looked at the webpage and it looks very, very good. I will check it out as soon as I can, and p…
Code size is a problem of in software engineering. Some people even think it is the most important problem we have. But it is not code size alone. You may not be working on a mammoth code base, but code size may still be a problem. Being more precise, excess o…
“Automated tests ensure the software is working as designed. Human tests ensure the design is working.” (quoted from Why Does Vista Suck? Blame Automated Testing) Do not get me wrong, I am a huge fan of automated testing. In fact I am a huge fa…
...as already pointed out. I know I don't really need too much evidence, but here we have some numbers about failure rate on IT projects. They can be handy someday ;-) It summarizes different studies, including some embarrassing bad numbers: 51 % (of the surv…