Comments on: What are your Seven Essential Practices?

By: Chris M

Chris M — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:30:37 +0000

I whole heartedly agree to number 4, the number of times IT have cocked up copy and paste, and then had to explain what went wrong is beyond annoying any frustrating.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:22:56 +0000

@Mike & @Silvers – I just watched the flash video on Crucible and was mightily impressed. I sent a link to my boss and am going to start bugging him about it purchasing a copy. It will work with .NET source files as long as we have Subversion, right?

@Silvers…If you give Jon a free license, I want one too…on account of copy-cat crimes…:-)

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:17:33 +0000

@Jon

Good point. Let me rephrase: I’d kill for the funds for a crucible license. I don’t suppose you are in the business of giving licenses away? To save a life : )

By: xcdesz

xcdesz — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:14:40 +0000

Great list. I wish more people thought this way. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 development projects dont practice any of these (I have been out interviewing, and this is what I’ve seen).

If anything, I would leave out number 6, and stick in a Wiki for maintaining a knowledge base.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:53:18 +0000

@Barnwell – I agree that peer reviews are helpful, but I would qualify that a little. I think static analysis tools like FxCop or NDepend should be used to automate as much as possible. FxCop is much better at being a code Nazi about naming standards, etc., than a person will ever be. NDepend can be used to identify the riskiest areas of code (cyclomatic complexity, excessive dependencies, long methods, etc), so that you get the biggest bang for your buck in peer reviews rather than trying to do everything or just do random samples.

By: Jon Silvers

Jon Silvers — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:47:49 +0000

“The place I work at now uses JIRA”… Glad it’s working out!

RE: Mike’s comment… you don’t need to kill for Crucible, mate, we sell it right on our website!

By: mike

mike — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:05:40 +0000

I read the list and thought, ‘what more could there be,’ then I saw Neil’s comment. Regular peer reviews would be an awesome addition to the list.

I use IntelliJ which I think would negate the need for Developer Productivity Tools (Resharper/CodeRush), so I would drop peer reviews there. I would kill for crucible.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/
http://www.atlassian.com/softw.....encast.jsp

By: Neil Barnwell

Neil Barnwell — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:26:14 +0000

I think you have the top 7, but #8 for me would be regular peer-review. I like the idea of pair programming but in the real world it’s not economical in most cases, but the have someone poke around in your code for head-slap mistakes can be a really helpful part of QA.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:15:37 +0000

I’m putting in a feature request to Jet Brains to add a short-cut keystroke that would automatically dispense a caffeinated beverage from the CD tray. I think that is the only thing stopping them from fully taking over the market share…:-)

By: Max Pool

Max Pool — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:32:07 +0000

You hit the top 7 right on the head, but since you asked I would trade a copy of Resharper for unlimited free soda.