… then a software team is like an aquarium.
“Programming is Gardening, not Engineering” says Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) in one of his well-known Artima conversations.
Inspired by such an interesting ‘organical’ comparison, it’s my metaphor of a software team which behaves quite like an aquarium. I assume not all my blog readers are aquaria [...]
Well, this is the very condensed version of Martin Fowler's latest approach to requirement creep. His idea is : (1) 'start by charging the double thus allowing a comfortable buffer for the project' then (2) 'accept all new requirements without charge, in the limits of the buffer', (3) 'explain and agree with the customer that [...]
If you haven't had the opportunity to work on a really big project, naming is probably not on your top list of programming best practices. And you are certainly going to regret that when your project grows.
Of course, everybody, including good old Scott, knows that CUST signifies CUSTOMER and DEPT signifies DEPARTMENT. And statistically speaking, [...]
There is a certain contradiction which appears in modern projects concerning the unit testing strategy. On one hand, there is a powerful assertion stating that business logic testing should be completely disconnected from the database. This makes perfect sense in a certain way : the tests should check the business logic, not the database and/or [...]
I'm being part of the development team for migration of a mainframe ERP to Java technology. A preliminary version of the app shows no less than 878 tables (see image). It could be much more, knowing that quite a lot of “lists of values” - which are not supposed to change frequently during the application's [...]