Pedro da Ros has pointed me an interesting article from Joel Spolsky about ways software projects go wrong. Five Easy Ways to Fail shows us five step-guide to ensure software failure:
Have you ever been in any situation like those above?
Some days ago me and ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bpfurtado were talking about different areas of interest on software development and the distance created by programmers in not involving themselves on another interesting (for me :-)) areas, such as process management, requirement analysis, change control processes, etcetera.
Programmers tend to create a barrier between their tasks and other areas on software development, they prefer to be more specialist. Most of them don’t like to participate on requirement analysis discussions, design sessions, development of test cases. They prefer to code instead of being involved on such activities.
When you work on a software development company, you must have interest at the *big thing*, you need to have the whole vision of your area. People around will put better eyes on you, if you show these interest.
Nowadays at my company I’m participating in activies like use case requirement analysis and programming, because I wanna be involved in the best of both worlds. I wanna increase my analysis and programming skills. It was my decision to participate part time on requirement analysis and the rest on programming activities. I think it’s very important to have this vision and consequently it makes you a better professional. And you? Dou you like to be involved not only in programming tasks?
Some days ago I finally had enough time to move all my Documents and Settings folder to a dedicated partition, storing my Home directory and files (I already know it’s very late for this…don’t have to remember me..). So, I was looking for a way to change the Firefox default profile location to this partition, keeping it safely separated from the installation files. It’s quite easy, the steps are as follws:
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=E:\Rafael\firefox_profile\profile.default
[ExtensionDirs]
Extension0=E:\Rafael\firefox_profile\profile.default\extensions\{34274bf4-1d97-a289-e984-17e546307e4f}
Extension1=E:\Rafael\firefox_profile\profile.default\extensions\{6AC85730-7D0F-4de0-B3FA-21142DD85326}
.
.
.
[ThemeDirs]
Extension0=C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions\{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}
Extension1=E:\Rafael\firefox_profile\profile.default\extensions\{eb46c787-131a-4eb7-9b93-7f62ca550917}
So I think this should works. Save those files and restart Firefox. Soon I will make these changes on my Linux kubuntu distro!
Sep 4
Some months ago, Cedric has reported people criticizing the use of design patterns on software projects, with some arguments like:
and other funny things also. Moreover, some said design patterns was inspired in Cristopher Alexander’s Pattern Language book, although design patterns leverage complexity to the programming languages, totally opposed to the Alexander’s book simplicity proposal. As Cedric said, people do criticize, but not provide better solutions. It’s inside our personality: we often try to find defects in all the ways people realize things, but we don’t like to search for better ways to realize the same things. In my opinion, design patterns are:
and some other benefits…
So, what do people want? Every time, every software project implementing the same feature in a different way? Of course we’re not saying here to insulate a lot of patterns in a sofware project, but, come on, why not establish a common vocabulary of software instead of doing things all diferent every time? Why reinventing the wheel?
Aug 26
Check out this interesting video about LucidTouch see-through mobile device. See-Through Mobile Devices let users see their hands while touching behind the display. Very nice.
Aug 16
Here are some good idioms by Scott Ambler on use case reuse. Must read.
I’m trying to keep this blog up to date, but it’s being very difficult…
Some companies think they’re applying iterative and incremental development, but in practice are doing waterfall development. Here are some tips described in Applying UML and Patterns, by Craig Larman, which can help you discover if your company doesn’t understand the Unified Process and iterative development (these tips can clarify all stakeholders misunderstanding about the difference of the two approaches):
Are you involved in such a situation at your company?
TheServerSide has raised a question about whether closures proposals to be implemented in the Java language are really necessary. In my opinion, I think the Java language must be as it is, because:
So, I think it’s better to maintain the language with the abstractions it already offers and focus on other improvements, like reifiable generics, that is, making generic type information available at runtime. And you? Will you think useful closures on the Java language?
Here is an interesting interview with the usability guru Jakob Nielsen which he says web firms are so emphasized in the hype of Web 2.0 as the “latest fashion” and at the same time the basic principles of webpages usability are always being forgotten. He claims about companies have to focus first in making good practices available like “making a site easy to use, good search tools, the use of text free of jargon, usability testing and a consideration of design even before the first line of code is written”. Also, Mr Jakob Nielsen says, as a interesting note, “The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad in the same way, they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right.”
Check out this great video about the new Java based inversion control framework from Google. The guys Kevin Bourillion and Bob Lee explains the concept behind dependency inversion principle (dip) and the core features inside Google Guice, called ‘juice’. The framework embraces and uses annotations instead of string identifiers (heavily used in Spring) to inject dependencies into the code. The most interesting feature is that Guice injects constructors, fields and methods (any methods with any number of arguments, not just setters) . You can also integrate Spring with Guice. Enjoy!