Archive for July, 2006

A Devil’s Dozen

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

"If you only have time to read one book---make time to read two." Here's a devil's dozen to keep you occupied at the cottage this summer... Project Management Berkun's The Art of Project Management and Stellman and Greene's Applied Software Project Management. Development Doar's Practical Development Environments, ...

Don’t You Just Love the Emperor’s Outfit?

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

From the abstract of Arisholm et al's "The Impact of UML Documentation on Software Maintenance: An Experimental Evaluation" (IEEE Trans. Soft. Eng, 32/6, June 2006): Results show that, for complex tasks and past a certain learning curve, the availability of UML documentation may result in significant improvements in the functional orrectness ...

Books I Want Someone to Write #23

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

I used to maintain a list of books that I wished someone would write, so that I could review them for Doctor Dobb's Journal. (It even happened once, which just goes to show that sympathetic magic actually works.) Rebecca Wirfs-Brock's latest article, "Designing for Recovery", reminds me that the ...

Evidence-Based Software Engineering

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

The July'06 issue of IEEE Software has an excellent article called "Agile Software Testing in a Large-Scale Project". It presents data on what happens when you introduce some XP practices into a large software project; as the authors say, "...this is the most comprehensive data set from an actual ...

The Worst Company URLs

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Some of these are so funny, they have to be true.

The Camel’s Humps Are Very Popular

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Four people have sent me links to this research in the last 24 hours. It claims that: there are two kinds of people: those who can push symbols around without concern for their "meaning" (or lack of it), and those who can't; the former can learn how to program, while the ...

How Are Developers Using Eclipse?

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

An article from researchers at UBC in the latest issue of IEEE Software analyzes how developers actually use Eclipse. The top five views from the standard distribution are Package Explorer, Console, Search, Problems, and Variables; the Declaration view was never used by their test subjects, even though it's displayed ...

Possible CSC49X Projects for Fall 2006

Monday, July 17th, 2006

All very tentative, but here are some of the options: Add more features to RedInk, the online marking and code review system we've built over the past twelve months. (Now full) Building a plugin for Blackboard to calculate and display statistics on the grades being given out by TAs in large courses ...

DrProject 1.0 Final now available

Monday, July 17th, 2006

We are very pleased to announce the release of DrProject 1.0. For those of you who aren't regular readers ;-), DrProject is a web-based software project management portal specifically tailored for classroom use. Like its predecessor, Trac, it integrates Subversion with a wiki, a simple bug ...

Are We Going to Keep Pretending…

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

Are we going to keep pretending women who want to do science and math [and computer science] aren't treated differently?