I had a great conversation with remi Taylor of OpenRain Software today on how to handle fuzzy requirements when the customer isn’t available. You’ve been there… you get an issue tracking ticket like “Add Foozle Support” only to find no explanation of what this means other than the issue title. The customer/decision maker decided to [...]
Posts Tagged ‘software’
Identifying Senior Software Engineers: Six Critical Differences
August 20th, 2008
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For HR and legal purposes, most development companies classify Software Engineers into ranks from I to IV (or V). The higher the rank, the higher the responsibilities, expectations, independence and pay grade. To cut it as an interviewer and manager, you’ll need to classify people accurately with a minimum amount of direct personal exposure: a [...]
Sufficiency In Software Testing
April 11th, 2008
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When I was finishing up my B.S. I took a class in embedded software testing. The big assignment was to write the software that controls a single elevator, test the software to our satisfaction and deliver the whole shebang at the end of the semester. The critical lesson I learned from the course was not [...]
Software Engineering Curse Words
July 6th, 2007
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Here lie terms frequently used in software development which I don’t particularly care for.
Programmer
Commercial software is as much about programming as building bridges is about installing steel I-beams. Writing actual code is only part of the engineering effort. When I see a job posting entitled “Java Programmer” I usually suspect that this is either (1) [...]
Singletons Cause Cancer
July 11th, 2006
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It’s been said before. I’ll say it again. The singleton pattern sucks. From a pragmatic point of view, it has two primary drawbacks: reuse and testability.
Reuse
A public static getInstance() method is, by definition, statically bound at compile time. Since you can’t override static methods, reusing singleton code via inheritance means you’ll need to create a [...]
