Dealing with botched software projects
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Borland Software this week stood atop its soapbox preaching the evils of software projects gone awry, with projects beset by issues such as last-minute changes and differing perspectives on the potential success of development efforts.
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Learning from past mistakes and looking to future opportunities.
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Blog: Many of the patches address flaws within Quicktime for Java.
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High tech narcissism or old fashioned stupidity? Every now and then, I think it's healthy to sit back and recap on industry best practice. However, I'm not going to do that here. It's much more fun to tear into worst practice.â¦
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The software company has undergone an extreme makeover.
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Matt Stephens gets to grip with people issues and team building  âThat it is people who write software is terribly obvious . . . and ignored.â So quotes Alistair Cockburn, himself quoting Gerald Weinberg, in his book Agile Software Development - catch our review of the Second Edition here. Itâs easy to see the people in your project as mere commodities â not helped by MS Projectâs insistence on labelling them as âresourcesâ â hot-swappable units that may be switched in and out of different roles or different projects, with no loss in productivity, creativity or morale.â¦
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!
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About 25% of a developer's time is spend searching for information. It's time well spent, though -- finding reusable code can get a project done on time and with high-quality results.
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In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).   IÃ¢ÂÂve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, itÃ¢ÂÂs probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.   Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.
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Over on Marco Tabini's Weblog today, there's a new posting that might hit close to home with quite a fe developers out there - a discussion on code documentation.
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Windows, Linux and Java each fail some basic integrity rules.
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).
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One of the proverbial back stories of IT operations has always been the battle between the "suits" and the "techies." From the techie point of view, the hapless but disturbingly powerful suits are the business guys who put more thought into picking out hundred-dollar silk ties at Nordstrom than they put into million-dollar IT decisions. Worse, the suits gravitate towards outsourcing and service firms that implement big-dollar solutions. Many techies start on the other end of the spectrum with free open source solutions that reflect a substantial DIY ethic. Will the twain ever meet?
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Blog: Many of the patches address flaws within QuickTime for Java.
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The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"   Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.   Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.