Low Country Software Ramblings

Testing is the word of the day…
Grab Bag

Simon Baker points to a discussion on multi-tasking as a way to avoid prioritization.

Scott Hanselman discusses email signature etiquette.  Lots of examples.

A .NET Rocks interview with Adam Cogan pointed to his exhaustive list of “Rules & Standards“.  While you might not agree with every single one, you wouldn’t go wrong following them.
Test Driven Design 

While I find that TestDriven.com’s scores low on my personal signal-to-noise ratio (too many commercial announcements), you should keep an eye out for their monthly recap.  I would suggest subscribing to the newsletter version if you don’t want to deal with all the RSS announcements.  From my perspective, the best part is the blogosphere activity. Of particular note this month:

• Alberto Savoia wonders why developer testing is not more prevalent.
• Srinivas Ramgopal posted his teams experience with an XP project.  This sparked a lively discussion. The site banner alone is worth a look.
• Jamis opines that with TDD, you should do UI first, not scaffolding.
• James Carr talks about backseat driving when pair programming.  While I’ve had my share of backseat drivers, it wasn’t while pair programming…

Testing
DDJ’s Michael Hunter has an interesting interview with Bj Rollison. The best quote: “Anecdotal evidence suggests that less than 5% of testers have read more than 1 book on software testing”.  That boggles my mind!  I’m on the design side of things, but even I have read a few books on the subject!  Both Michael’s & Bj’s blogs are worth a read… *sigh*

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Of hackers and mere mortals…

Agile

Mary & Tom Poppendieck have an interview over at InfoQ about applying Lean manufacturing concepts to software development.

Maris Fogels brings up a potential parallel between software and subway lines.  When doing work with a large amount of uncertainty, civil engineering firms tend to use a cost-plus contract.  Software tends to be fixed-priced bids, even though there is a large amount of uncertainty.  Why not use cost-plus?
Community

Scott Bellware is looking for .NET Developers at Dovetail in Austin. XP/Scrum, .NET 3.0, even Orcas! Man that looks like it would be fun!

Larry O’Brien has been hacked and he’s mad. If he is done in by a Rootkit, what hope do the rest of us have?

Development

JD Meier shows you how to structure your Team System Foundation Server. The problem we run into (which is not an issue with .NET languages) is where to put the C++ include files. This post is silent on the matter. (via Brad Abrams)

Brian Button has a nifty powershell script which will convert RTF files to text files (or any other format Word supports). Powershell is awesome!

A new blog by Jeff Brown, a fellow native of the Ottawa Region.  Jeff is heavily involved with MbUnit, but his blog promises to be wider ranging…”I’d love to eat Monads for breakfast but Haskell O’s and .Net Flakes go together like milk and orange juice (at least when consumed at the office)” (thanks to Andrew Stopford)

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The integration I do now has nothing to do with the integration I did in college. Calculus was easier…
Agile

Mike Cohn, author of Agile Estimating and Planning, was interviewed by Dina Henry-Scott of Controlling Chaos. Get it here.

Test-Driven Development

Roy Osherove puts a new twist on the age-old practice of code reviews: Test Reviews. He asserts it is actually easier to find logic errors by reviewing the tests.

TestDriven.NET 2.4 Beta is available. With support for NUnit 2.4 RC2. (via The Daily Grind)
Embedded

Some tidbits from Jack Ganssle’s newsletter. DO subscribe!

The Embedded System Conference will be in San Jose, April 1-5. On the menu: the teardown of a Toyota Prius, Al Gore as the keynote speaker, Orange County Chopper in attendance (will Mikey be there?)

Ralf Holly wrote an interesting article on Compile Time Assertions for Doctor Dobb’s Journal. It’s an oldie but a goodie!

Intel, the company that launched the embedded systems industry with their four-bit 4004 in 1971, has announced the end-of-life for most of their embedded processors. The MCS51, MCS251, MCS96, 80X18X, 80X386, 80X486, and i960 will no longer be available. Last buy is March 30, 2007, with final shipments made by September 28.

If you will be porting Linux to an embedded system, take a serious look at “Embedded Linux Primer, A Practical Real-World Approach” by Christopher Hallinan. It goes into much details of what is involved in embedding Linux.

Former Colleague Doug Gaff has a wrap-up of EclipseCon 2007. Why is this under embedded? Because Doug works for WindRiver and they are using eclipse all over the place; builds, debugging, hardware bring-up. Device Software Development Platform… Thinking eclipse = Java is soooo 20th century.

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First of many?!

Testing

Master Tester Adam Goucher has an interesting test heuristic…’Build your own lightsaber‘

Andrew Stopford writes about Pex, a new testing framework developed by Microsoft Research.  I could see some nice applications for this.
Community

Brad Abrams is looking for examples of failed internet technologies.  Give him a hand!

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Today marks the 30th day since the resumption of regular blogging.  Out of those 30 days, I posted 29 blog entries.  How do those entries compare with earlier ones?

• They tended to be shorter
• More off-topic (i.e. not related to embedded systems, agile or .NET)

I don’t think it comes as a revelation that trying to come up with original content is dang difficult, especially when the time available is minimal.

All in all, I believe I prefer to craft longer pieces than what I have been doing recently.  In order to do this, I will probably be unable to maintain a daily pace.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to spawn another hiatus.

As a compromise, I think I might post a semi-daily roundup of interesting items, similar to Sam Gentile’s New and Notable or The Daily Grind, with occasional longer pieces thrown in just for fun.

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