Search Results

Search found 37426 results on 1498 pages for 'simple talk editorial team'.

Page 177/1498 | < Previous Page | 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184  | Next Page >

• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for December 11, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Good To Know - Conflicting View Objects and Shared Entity | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares his thoughts—and a sample application—dealing with an "interesting ADF behavior" encountered over the weekend. Patching Oracle Exalogic - Updating Linux on the Compute Nodes - Part 1 | Jos Nijhoff Jos Nijhoff launches a series of posts the deal with "patching the operating system on the modified Sun Fire X4170 M2 servers...dubbed compute nodes in Exalogic terminology." Expanding on requestaudit - Tracing who is doing what...and for how long | Kyle Hatlestad "One of the most helpful tracing sections in WebCenter Content (and one that is on by default) is the requestaudit tracing," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Kyle Hatlestad. Get up close and technical in his post. Oracle Data Integrator Presentation from NYOUG Webinar | Gurcan Orhan Oracle ACE Director and award-winning data warehouse architect Gurcan Orhan shares his presentation from the recent NYOUG LI SIG. SOA 11g Technology Adapters – ECID Propagation | Greg Mally "Many SOA Suite 11g deployments include the use of the technology adapters for various activities including integration with FTP, database, and files to name a few," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Greg Mally. "Although the integrations with these adapters are easy and feature rich, there can be some challenges from the operations perspective." Greg's post focuses on technical tips for dealing with one of these challenges. Missing Duties for RUP3 upgrade in Fusion Applications Richard from the Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team explains how to safely apply policy store changes in thirteen easy steps. Thought for the Day "Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

  Read the article

• Feasibility to take over a JavaMe Project by Coders who have no experience in JavaMe

  - by Stephenmjm

  As the original JavaMe team will leave to do other items. The JavaMe project will be taken over by some guys knowing nothing about JavaMe. Transition period: One month About this JavaMe project: about 3.5 million lines of code (more than 180 java file, SourceCode is 8.5KB in total) using the Polish, Proguard document: The JavaMe project itself have no document. No UML map. Difficulties I guess: familiar with the JavaMe, this should be okay In order to do the further development. We need to Read the sourceCode ---- It's not easy to read 3.5 million lines of code having not enough comment Adaptation work for more than 100 phone These are the questions, thank you! In the case of our guys have no experience in JavaMe, Is one month too hasty? In order to take the job in time . What we should ask the original JavaMe team to do . Considering we hava no experience in JavaMe. The complication we taking the Adaptation work without the original JavaMe team? Any other suggestions?

  Read the article

• It&rsquo;s About You: Tell Microsoft How They&rsquo;re Doing!

  - by juanlarios

  Every fall and spring, a survey goes out to a few hundred thousand IT folk in Canada asking what they think of Microsoft as a company. The information they get from this survey helps them understand what problems and issues you’re facing and how they can do better. The team at Microsoft Canada takes the input they get from this survey very seriously. Now I don’t know who of you will get the survey and who won’t but if you do find an email in your inbox from "Microsoft Feedback” with an email address of “ [email protected] ” and a subject line “Help Microsoft Focus on Customers and Partners” from now until April 13th — it’s not a hoax or phishing email. Please open it and take a few minutes to tell them what you think. This is your chance to get your voice heard: If they’re doing well, feel free to pile on the kudos (they love positive feedback!) and if you see areas they can improve, please point them out so they can make adjustments (they also love constructive criticism!). The Microsoft team would like to thank you for all your feedback in the past — to those of you who have filled out the survey and sent them emails. Thank you to all who engage with them in so many different ways through events, the blogs, online and in person. You are why they do what they do and they feel lucky to work with such a great community! One last thing - even if you don’t get the survey you can always give the team feedback by emailing us directly through the Microsoft Canada IT Pro Feedback email address . They want to make sure they are serving you in the best possible way. Tell them what you want more of. What should they do less of or stop altogether? How can they help? Do you want more cowbell ? Let them know through the survey or the email alias. They love hearing from you!

  Read the article

• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 2 - For the record

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  At SSW we have always done Agile. Recently we have started doing Scrum and we have nearly completed our first Sprint ever using Scrum. As you probably guessed from my previous post, it looks like it is going to be a “Failed Sprint”, but the Scrum Team (This includes the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner) has learned a huge amount about working in the Scrum Framework. We have been running with a “Proxy Product Owner” for the last two weeks, but a simple mistake occurred either during the “Product Planning Meeting” or the “Sprint Planning Meeting” that could have prevented this Sprint from failing. We has a heated discussion on the vision of someone not in the room which ended with the assertion that the Product Owner would be quizzed again on their vision. This did not happen and we ran with the “Proxy Product Owner’s vision for two weeks. Product Owner vision: Update Component A of Product A to Silverlight Proxy Product Owner vision: Update Product A to Silverlight Do you see the problem? Worse than that, as we had a lot of junior members of the Scrum Team and we are just feeling our way around how Scrum will work at SSW I missed implementing a fundamental rule. That’s right, it was me. It does not matter that I did not know about this rule, its on the site and I should have read it. Would a police officer let you off if you did not know that a red light meant stop? I think not… But, what is this amazing rule I hear you shout.. Its simple, as per our rule I should have sent the following email: “ Dear Proxy Product Owner, For the record, I disagree that the Product Owner wants us to ‘Update Product A to Silverlight’ as I still think that he wants us to ‘Update Component A of Product A to Silverlight’ and not the entire application. Regards Martin” - ‘For the record’ - Rules to being Software Consultants - Dealing with Clients This email should have been copied to the entire Scrum Team, which would have included the Product Owner, who would have nipped this misunderstanding in the bud and we would have had one less impediment. Technorati Tags: SSW,SSW Rules,SSW Standards,Scrum,Product Owner,ScrumMaster,Sprint,Sprint Planning Meeting,Product Planning Meeting

  Read the article

• Data Quality Through Data Governance

  Data Quality Governance Data quality is very important to every organization, bad data cost an organization time, money, and resources that could be prevented if the proper governance was put in to place.  Data Governance Program Criteria: Support from Executive Management and all Business Units Data Stewardship Program  Cross Functional Team of Data Stewards Data Governance Committee Quality Structured Data It should go without saying but any successful project in today’s business world must get buy in from executive management and all stakeholders involved with the project. If management does not fully support a project because they see it is in there and the company’s best interest then they will remove/eliminate funding, resources and allocated time to work on the project. In essence they can render a project dead until it is official killed by the business. In addition, buy in from stake holders is also very important because they can cause delays increased spending in time, money and resources because they do not support a project. Data Stewardship programs are administered by a data steward manager who primary focus is to support, train and manage a cross functional data stewards team. A cross functional team of data stewards are pulled from various departments act to ensure that all systems work to ensure that an organization’s goals are achieved. Typically, data stewards are subject matter experts that act as mediators between their respective departments and IT. Data Quality Procedures Data Governance Committees are composed of data stewards, Upper management, IT Leadership and various subject matter experts depending on a company. The primary goal of this committee is to define strategic goals, coordinate activities, set data standards and offer data guidelines for the business. Data Quality Policies In 1997, Claudia Imhoff defined a Data Stewardship’s responsibility as to approve business naming standards, develop consistent data definitions, determine data aliases, develop standard calculations and derivations, document the business rules of the corporation, monitor the quality of the data in the data warehouse, define security requirements, and so forth. She further explains data stewards responsible for creating and enforcing polices on the following but not limited to issues. Resolving Data Integration Issues Determining Data Security Documenting Data Definitions, Calculations, Summarizations, etc. Maintaining/Updating Business Rules Analyzing and Improving Data Quality

  Read the article

• Is it reasonable to expect knowing the whole stack bottom up?

  - by Vaibhav Garg

  I am an Sr. developer/architect/Product Manager for embedded systems. The systems that I have had experience with have typically been small to medium size codebases - typically close to 25-30K LOC in C, using 8-16 and 32 bit low end microcontrollers. The systems have been entirely bootstrapped by our team - meaning right from the start-up code to the end application code has either been written by the team, or at the very least, is thoroughly understood and maintained by us. Now, if we were to start developing more complex systems with complex peripherals, such as USB OTG et al. (think, low end cell phones), there are libraries and stacks available commercially and from chip vendors that reduce the task to just calling the right APIs and being able to use those peripherals. Now, from a habit point of view, this does not give me and the team a comfortable feeling, not being able to comprehend the entire code tree, with virtual black boxes at the lower layers. Is it reasonable to devote, and reserve, time getting into the details of how the APIs are implemented, assuming that the same would also entail getting into details of relevant standards (again, for USB as an example)? Or, alternatively, should a thorough understanding of the top level usage of the APIs be sufficient? This of course assumes that the source codes to all libraries are available, which they are, in almost all cases. Edit: In partial response to @Abhi Beckert, the documentation is refreshingly very comprehensive and meticulously maintained, AFAIK and been able to judge. I have not had a long experience with the same.

  Read the article

• HSSFS Part 2.1 - Parsing @@VERSION

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  For Part 2 of the Handy SQL Server Function Series I decided to tackle parsing useful information from the @@VERSION function, because I am an idiot.  It turns out I was confused about CHARINDEX() vs. PATINDEX() and it pretty much invalidated my original solution.  All is not lost though, this mistake turned out to be informative for me, and hopefully for you. Referring back to the "Version" view in the prelude I started with the following query to extract the version number: SELECT DISTINCT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, 12) VerNum FROM VERSION I used PATINDEX() to find the first hyphen "-" character in the string, since the version number appears 2 positions after it, and got these results: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- ------------ 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.3080.00 2005 9.00.4053.00 2008 10.50.1600.1 As you can see it was good enough for most of the values, but not for the SQL 2000 @@VERSION.  You'll notice it has only 3 version sections/octets where the others have 4, and the SUBSTRING() grabbed the non-numeric characters after.  To properly parse the version number will require a non-fixed value for the 3rd parameter of SUBSTRING(), which is the number of characters to extract. The best value is the position of the first space to occur after the version number (VN), the trick is to figure out how to find it.  Here's where my confusion about PATINDEX() came about.  The CHARINDEX() function has a handy optional 3rd parameter: CHARINDEX (expression1 ,expression2 [ ,start_location ] ) While PATINDEX(): PATINDEX ('%pattern%',expression ) Does not.  I had expected to use PATINDEX() to start searching for a space AFTER the position of the VN, but it doesn't work that way.  Since there are plenty of spaces before the VN, I thought I'd try PATINDEX() on another character that doesn't appear before, and tried "(": SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)) FROM VERSION Unfortunately this messes up the length calculation and yields: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- --------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (Intel X86) Dec 16 2008 19:4 2005 9.00.3080.00 (Intel X86) Sep 6 2009 01: 2005 9.00.4053.00 (Intel X86) May 26 2009 14: 2008 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86) Apr 2008 10.50.1600.1 (X64) Apr 2 20 Yuck.  The problem is that PATINDEX() returns position, and SUBSTRING() needs length, so I have to subtract the VN starting position: SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)-PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)) VerNum FROM VERSION And the results are: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- -------------------------------------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.4053.00 (I Msg 537, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function. Ummmm, whoops.  Turns out SQL Server 2008 R2 includes "(RTM)" before the VN, and that causes the length to turn negative. So now that that blew up, I started to think about matching digit and dot (.) patterns.  Sadly, a quick look at the first set of results will quickly scuttle that idea, since different versions have different digit patterns and lengths. At this point (which took far longer than I wanted) I decided to cut my losses and redo the query using CHARINDEX(), which I'll cover in Part 2.2.  So to do a little post-mortem on this technique: PATINDEX() doesn't have the flexibility to match the digit pattern of the version number; PATINDEX() doesn't have a "start" parameter like CHARINDEX(), that allows us to skip over parts of the string; The SUBSTRING() expression is getting pretty complicated for this relatively simple task! This doesn't mean that PATINDEX() isn't useful, it's just not a good fit for this particular problem.  I'll include a version in the next post that extracts the version number properly. UPDATE: Sorry if you saw the unformatted version of this earlier, I'm on a quest to find blog software that ACTUALLY WORKS.

  Read the article

• Announcing the MOS WCI "Community"

  - by brian.harrison

  The WCI Technical Support team are please to announce the launch of the long awaited WCI Support Community on My Oracle Support (MOS) "Community". Users can navigate to this "first stop" for WebCenter Interaction information by logging on to following this link: WCI Community (Note that this requires a valid login credential to the My Oracle Support tool). In this community you'll find a product related discussion forum moderated by Oracle WebCenter Interaction support engineers, recommended tips and tricks, links to knowledge base articles and best practices for setting up and administering up your environment. We hope you'll take a minute to have a look through the community. If you have a question about WebCenter Interaction, a comment or a suggestion regarding the content, please feel free to post it to the forum and someone will respond to your request. Think of the forum here as another method to communicate directly with the WCI Technical Support team for questions and answers to simple WCI support topics. The forum is moderated by WCI Technical Support engineers directly and we hope it will help you avoid the need to log support incidents for less complex support related questions. We encourage all of our customers, both internal and external, to participate in the forums discussions, sharing information, knowledge, best practices and in the effort to help us build a vital and vibrant "home base" for WCI users on the My Oracle Support tool. Thank you for visiting! The WebCenter Interaction Support Community Moderator Team

  Read the article

• Naming conventions: camelCase versus underscore_case ? what are your thoughts about it? [closed]

  - by poelinca

  I've been using underscore_case for about 2 years and I recently switched to camelCase because of the new job (been using the later one for about 2 months and I still think underscore_case is better suited for large projects where there are alot of programmers involved, mainly because the code is easier to read). Now everybody at work uses camelCase because (so they say) the code looks more elegant . What are you're thoughts about camelCase or underscore_case p.s. please excuse my bad english Edit Some update first: platform used is PHP (but I'm not expecting strict PHP platform related answers , anybody can share their thoughts on which would be the best to use , that's why I came here in the first place) I use camelCase just as everibody else in the team (just as most of you recomend) we use Zend Framework which also recommends camelCase Some examples (related to PHP) : Codeigniter framework recommends underscore_case , and honestly the code is easier to read . ZF recomends camelCase and I'm not the only one who thinks ZF code is a tad harder to follow through. So my question would be rephrased: Let's take a case where you have the platform Foo which doesn't recommend any naming conventions and it's the team leader's choice to pick one. You are that team leader, why would you pick camelCase or why underscore_case? p.s. thanks everybody for the prompt answers so far

  Read the article

• Using Scrum on small projects where Owner doesn't want to be involved

  - by Andrej Mohar

  Recently I've been reading and learning quite a lot about scrum and I like it a lot. However, I do have a couple of likely scenarios in my head to which I don't know the solution. So let's say that I might want to organize an agile team of (for instance) four web developers (one of them UI/UX designer). This team would operate on scrum principles. Initially we would probably be working on projects like landing pages for ordinary people's small businesses, like renting apartments, selling cookies... Such customers simply can't be set with Product Owner role (IMHO), because they usually expect to hire a company, give them the overall project goal with some details, and then expect the job to be done (including a lot of decision making) with as little of their involvement as possible (in their opinion, they have more important things to do). Let's say I'd like to engage myself in a developer/scrum master role (I know that even that is debatable, being a team member and scrum master at once), so I simply shouldn't take the role of the product owner as well. So as for my questions: If I'm my company's business owner, do I simply need to be a product owner as well (do these roles include each other)? Can I employ a sales person which might have the product owner role? Would it be better if it is an experienced developer instead of a sales person? Is this even a smart move? Lastly, is there another agile approach that might better suit my position? EDIT: Thank you everyone for good inputs. I added some comments, any aditional info will be greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• 24 Hours of PASS: Whine, Whine, Whine

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  24 Hours of Pass (or 24HOP) is a great program offered by PASS to provide free, online training for anyone who wants to learn more about SQL Server.  They routinely have the best SQL Server presenters available for these sessions, and attract hundreds, perhaps even a thousand attendees from around the world.  This is definitely one of the best things they've started doing in the past few years, and every session I've attended has been excellent. So why am I so grumpy about it? I'm not really, pretty much everything here is a minor annoyance that I can deal with.  However since they're so minor they seem to be things that can be easily corrected and would make the process much better. First off, this is my biggest gripe, the registration page: https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000181573/Registration.aspx?pageName=lj6378f4fhf5hpdm What grinds my gears about this?  I have to scroll alllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way to bottom to actually register for the sessions.  This wouldn't be so bad except all the details of the session, including the presenter, is in a separate list at the top.  Both lists contain info the other does not, and scrolling between them to determine "Should I make time to listen to this?  Who is speaking at this time anyway?" is really unnecessary. My preference would be to keep the top list and add the checkboxes and schedule info in separate columns.  This is a full-width design, so there's plenty of space for this data, which is pretty small anyway.  The other huge benefit is halving the size of the page, which improves performance and lowers bandwidth usage considerably.  And if you know HTML/ASP.Net, and you view the page source, you can find PLENTY of other things that can be reduced even further.  (not just viewstate) One nice thing that PASS does is send iCal reminders to your email address so you can accept them to your calendar.  Again, they leave off the presenter in the appointment details, while still duplicating the meeting title in the body.  Sometimes I make decisions based on speaker rather than content (Natalie Portman is reading the Yellow Pages??? I'M THERE!) and having the speaker in the iCal is helpful. Next minor annoyances are the necessity for providing a company name, and the survey questions.  I know PASS needs to market themselves effectively, and they need information to do that, and since this is a free event it's really not worth complaining about, but why ask the survey question twice? (once at registration, once again when joining the LiveMeeting)  Same thing for the company name.  All of this should be tied to email address, so that's all I should need to enter when joining the LiveMeeting. The last one is also minor, but it irks me in this day and age of multiple browsers and the decline of Internet Explorer as a dominant platform.  The registration page was originally created in Visual Studio 2003, and has a lot of IE-specific crud representative of the browser situation of 2003. (IE5 references? really? and is the aforementioned viewstate big enough?)  This causes some grief with other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and sometimes IE8 or 9.  And don't get me started on using the page on a Mac or in Safari. My main point is that PASS is an international organization, welcoming everyone from all levels of SQL Server proficiency, and in that spirit I think it would help to accommodate a wider range of browser software, especially since the registration page is extremely simple.  I recognize that this page is not hosted on the PASS website and may be maintained by some division of Microsoft, but to me that's even worse if MS can't update their own pages.  They've deprecated IE6, so they don't need to maintain support on their own websites anymore. OK, I'll shut up now. #sqlpass #24HOP

  Read the article

• Scaling Scrum within a group of 100s of programmers

  - by blunders

  Most Scrum teams lean toward 7-15 people **, though it's not clear how to scale Scrum among 100s of people, or how the effectiveness of a given team might be compared to another team within the group; meaning beyond just breaking the group into Scrum teams of 7-15 people, it's unclear how efforts between the teams are managed, compared, etc. Any suggestions related to either of these topics, or additional related topics that might be of more importance to account for in planning a large scale SCRUM grouping? ** In reviewing research related to the suggested size of software development teams, which appears to be the basis for the suggested Scrum team size, I found what appears to be an error in the research which oddly appears to show that bigger teams (15+ ppl), not smaller teams (7 ppl) are better. UPDATE, "Re: Scrum doesn't scale": Made huge amounts of progress on personally researching the topic, but thought I'd respond to the general belief of some that Scrum doesn't scale by citing a quote from Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn : Scrum Does Scale: You have to admire the intellectual honesty of the earliest agile authors. They were all very careful to say that agile methodolgies like Scrum were for small projects. This conservatism wasn’t because agile or Scrum turned out to be unsuited for large projects but because they hadn’t used these processes on large projects and so were reluctant to advise their readers to do so. But, in the years since the Agile Manifesto and the books that came shortly before and after it, we have learned that the principles and practices of agile development can be scaled up and applied on large projects, albeit it with a considerable amount of overhead. Fortunately, if large organizations use the techniques described regarding the role of the product owner, working with a shared product backlog, being mindful of dependencies, coordinating work among teams, and cultivating communities of practice, they can successfully scale a Scrum project. SOURCE: (ran across the book thanks to Ladislav Mrnka answer)

  Read the article

• How can we make agile enjoyable for developers that like to personally, independently own large chunks from start to finish

  - by Kris

  We’re roughly midway through our transition from waterfall to agile using scrum; we’ve changed from large teams in technology/discipline silos to smaller cross-functional teams. As expected, the change to agile doesn’t suit everyone. There are a handful of developers that are having a difficult time adjusting to agile. I really want to keep them engaged and challenged, and ultimately enjoying coming to work each day. These are smart, happy, motivated people that I respect on both a personal and a professional level. The basic issue is this: Some developers are primarily motivated by the joy of taking a piece of difficult work, thinking through a design, thinking through potential issues, then solving the problem piece by piece, with only minimal interaction with others, over an extended period of time. They generally complete work to a high level of quality and in a timely way; their work is maintainable and fits with the overall architecture. Transitioning to a cross-functional team that values interaction and shared responsibility for work, and delivery of working functionality within shorter intervals, the teams evolve such that the entire team knocks that difficult problem over. Many people find this to be a positive change; someone that loves to take a problem and own it independently from start to finish loses the opportunity for work like that. This is not an issue with people being open to change. Certainly we’ve seen a few people that don’t like change, but in the cases I’m concerned about, the individuals are good performers, genuinely open to change, they make an effort, they see how the rest of the team is changing and they want to fit in. It’s not a case of someone being difficult or obstructionist, or wanting to hoard the juiciest work. They just don’t find joy in work like they used to. I’m sure we can’t be the only place that hasn’t bumped up on this. How have others approached this? If you’re a developer that is motivated by personally owning a big chunk of work from end to end, and you’ve adjusted to a different way of working, what did it for you?

  Read the article

• Separation of development responsibilities in a new project

  - by dreza

  We have very recently started a new project (MVC 3.0) and some of our early discussion has been around how the work and development will be split amongst the team members to ensure we get the least amount of overlap of work and so help make it a bit easier for each developer to get on and do their work. The project is expected to take about 6 months - 1 year (although not all developers are likely to be on and might filter off towards the end), Our team is going to be small so this will help out a bit I believe. The team will essentially consist of: 3 x developers (All different levels i.e. more senior, intermediate and junior) 1 x project manager / product owner / tester An external company responsbile for doing our design work General project/development decisions so far have included: Develop in an Agile way using SCRUM techniques (We are still very much learning this approach as a company) Use MVVM archectecture Use Ninject and DI where possible Attempt to use as TDD as much as possible to drive development. Keep our controllers as skinny as possible Keep our views as simple as possible During our discussions two approaches have been broached as too how to seperate the workload given our objectives outlined above. OPTION 1: A framework seperation where each person is responsible for conceptual areas with overlap and discussion primarily in the integration areas. The integration areas would the responsibily of both developers as required. View prototypes (**Graphic designer**) | - Mockups | Views (Razor and view helpers etc) & Javascript (**Developer 1**) | - View models (Integration point) | Controllers and Application logic (**Developer 2**) | - Models (Integration point) | Domain model and persistence (**Developer 3**) OPTION 2: A more task orientated approach where each person is responsible for the completion of the entire task (story) from view - controller - model. QUESTION: For those who have worked in small teams developing MVC projects how have you managed the workload distribution in this situation. I can't imagine the junior would be responsible for building parts of the underlying architecture so would given them responsibility for the view make sense considering we are trying to keep it simple?

  Read the article

• How can we make agile enjoyable for developers that like to personally, independently own large chunks from start to finish

  - by Kris

  We’re roughly midway through our transition from waterfall to agile using scrum; we’ve changed from large teams in technology/discipline silos to smaller cross-functional teams. As expected, the change to agile doesn’t suit everyone. There are a handful of developers that are having a difficult time adjusting to agile. I really want to keep them engaged and challenged, and ultimately enjoying coming to work each day. These are smart, happy, motivated people that I respect on both a personal and a professional level. The basic issue is this: Some developers are primarily motivated by the joy of taking a piece of difficult work, thinking through a design, thinking through potential issues, then solving the problem piece by piece, with only minimal interaction with others, over an extended period of time. They generally complete work to a high level of quality and in a timely way; their work is maintainable and fits with the overall architecture. Transitioning to a cross-functional team that values interaction and shared responsibility for work, and delivery of working functionality within shorter intervals, the teams evolve such that the entire team knocks that difficult problem over. Many people find this to be a positive change; someone that loves to take a problem and own it independently from start to finish loses the opportunity for work like that. This is not an issue with people being open to change. Certainly we’ve seen a few people that don’t like change, but in the cases I’m concerned about, the individuals are good performers, genuinely open to change, they make an effort, they see how the rest of the team is changing and they want to fit in. It’s not a case of someone being difficult or obstructionist, or wanting to hoard the juiciest work. They just don’t find joy in work like they used to. I’m sure we can’t be the only place that hasn’t bumped up on this. How have others approached this? If you’re a developer that is motivated by personally owning a big chunk of work from end to end, and you’ve adjusted to a different way of working, what did it for you?

  Read the article

• How to refactor while keeping accuracy and redundancy?

  - by jluzwick

  Before I ask this question I will preface it with our environment. My team consists of 3 programmers working on multiple different projects. Due to this, our use of testing is mostly limited to very general black box testing. Take the following assumptions also: Unit Tests will eventually be written but I'm under strict orders to refactor first Ignore common Test-Driven Development techniques when given this environment, my time is limited. I understand that if this were done correctly, our team would actually save money in the long-term by building Unit-Tests before hand. I'm about to refactor a fairly large portion of the code that is critical. While I believe my code will accurately work when done and after our black box testing, I realize that there will be new data that the new code might not be able to handle. What I wanted to know is how to keep old code that functions 98% of the time so that we can call those subroutines in case the new code doesn't work properly. Right now I'm thinking of separating the old code in a separate class file and adding a variable to our config that will tell the program which code to use. Is there a better way to handle this? NOTE: We do use revision control and we have archived builds so the client could always revert to a previous build, but I would like to see if there is a decent way of doing this besides reverting. I want this so they can use the other new functionality delivered in the new build. Edit: While I agree I will need to write Unit Tests for this, I don't believe I will capture everything with them. I'm looking for ways to easily be able to revert to the old, functional code should anything happen. While I know this is a poor practice, I'm planning on removing this code after our team can guarantee that the new code works to the same standards as the old.

  Read the article

• Introducing Elke Phelps, Guest Author

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  I'm very pleased to welcome Elke Phelps as a new contributor to this blog.  Elke needs little introduction to most long-time readers, as she's been a pillar of the E-Business Suite sysadmin community for years.  What's special about this announcement is that Elke is joining this blog's panel of guest authors as a member of my Product Management team in the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group.  I am thrilled to have her as part of my team and look forward to her contributions to this blog. Here's a short bio: Elke is a Product Manager in the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group.  She joined Oracle in 2011 after having been an Oracle customer and Oracle Technologist (Oracle Database Administrator, Oracle Applications DBA, Technical Architect and Technical Manager of an Oracle Applications DBA Team) since 1993. Elke is the lead author of the Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide (Apress 2006) and Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide (Coqui Tech and Press 2010).  Elke is also the founder of the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) E-Business Suite Applications Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and served as President of the SIG from February 2005 - August 2011.  Elke has been a speaker at Oracle OpenWorld and Collaborate since 2004.  Prior to joining Oracle, Elke was designated an Oracle ACE (2007) and Oracle ACE Director (2009).   Elke has a Computer Science Degree and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Oklahoma.  In her spare time, Elke enjoys traveling especially to Europe, Puerto Rico and the amazing US National Parks.  Elke also enjoys hiking, antiquing, gardening and cooking. 

  Read the article

• C/C++: Who uses the logical operator macros from iso646.h and why?

  - by Jaime Soto

  There has been some debate at work about using the merits of using the alternative spellings for C/C++ logical operators in iso646.h: and && and_eq &= bitand & bitor | compl ~ not ! not_eq != or || or_eq |= xor ^ xor_eq ^= According to Wikipedia, these macros facilitate typing logical operators in international (non-US English?) and non-QWERTY keyboards. All of our development team is in the same office in Orlando, FL, USA and from what I have seen we all use the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; even Dvorak provides all the necessary characters. Supporters of using the iso646.h macros claim we should them because they are part of the C and C++ standards. I think this argument is moot since digraphs and trigraphs are also part of these standards and they are not even supported by default in many compilers. My rationale for opposing these macros in our team is that we do not need them since: Everybody on our team uses the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; C and C++ programming books from the US barely mention iso646.h, if at all; and new developers may not be familiar with iso646.h (this is expected if they are from the US). /rant Finally, to my set of questions: Does anyone in this site use the iso646.h logical operator macros? Why? What is your opinion about using the iso646.h logical operator macros in code written and maintained on US English QWERTY keyboards? Is my digraph and trigraph analogy a valid argument against using iso646.h with US English QWERTY keyboard layouts? EDIT: I missed two similar questions in StackOverflow: Is anybody using the named boolean operators? Which C++ logical operators do you use: and, or, not and the ilk or C style operators? why?

  Read the article

• Too Clever for My Own Good

  - by AjarnMark

  Yesterday I caught myself being a little too clever for my own good with some ASP.NET code.  It seems that I have forgotten some of my good old classic HTML and JavaScript skills, and become too dependent on the .NET Framework and WebControls to do the work for me.  Here’s the scenario… In order to improve the User Interface and better communicate to the user when something is happening that they need to wait for, we have started to modify some of our larger (slower) pages to display messages like Processing… or Reloading… while they are cycling through a postback.  (Yes, I understand this could be improved by using AJAX / Callbacks and so on, but even then, you need to let your user know that they need to wait for that section to be re-rendered, so for the moment these pages will continue to use good ol’ Postbacks.)  It’s a very simple trick, really.  All I want to do is when some control triggers a postback, first run a little client-side JavaScript to hide the main contents of the page (such as a GridView) and display the appropriate message.  This lets the user know, “Hey, we’re doing something, don’t click another link or scroll and try to take action right now.” The first places I hooked this up were easy.  Most common cause of a postback:  Buttons.  And when you’re writing the markup or declarative code for an ASP:Button control, there is the handy OnClientClick property which is designed for just this purpose…to run client-side JavaScript before the postback occurs.  This is distinguished from the OnClick property which tells the control what Server-side code to run.  Great!  Done!  Easy! But then there are other controls like DropDownLists and CheckBoxes that we use on our pages with the AutoPostback=True setting which cause postbacks.  And these don’t have OnClientClick or OnClientSelectedIndexChanged events.  So I started getting creative, using an ASP:CustomValidator control in conjunction with setting the CausesValidation and ValidationGroup settings on these controls, which basically caused the action on the control to fire the Custom Validator, which was defined with a Client Side validation function which then did the hide content/show message code (and return a meaningless IsValid setting).  This also caused me to define a different ValidationGroup setting for my real data entry validator controls so that I could control them separately and only have them fire when I really wanted validation, and not just my show/hide trick. For a little while I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with this clever approach to get around what I considered to be a serious oversight on the DropDownList and CheckBox controls declarative syntax.  Then, in the midst of my smugness, just as I was about to commit my changes to the source code repository, it dawned on me that there is a much simpler and much more appropriate way to accomplish this.  All that I really needed to do was to put in my server-side code (I used the Page_Init section) a call to MyControl.Attributes.Add(“onClick”, “myJavaScriptFunctionName()”) for the checkboxes, and for the DropDownLists (which become select tags) use “onChange” instead of “onClick”.  This is exactly the type of thing that the Attributes collection is there for…so you can add attributes to be rendered with the control that you would have otherwise stuck right into the HTML markup if you had been doing this by hand in the first place. Ugh!  A few hours wasted on clever tricks that I ended up completely removing, but I did learn a lot more about custom validators and validation groups in the process.  And got a good reminder that all that stuff (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) I learned back when I wrote classic ASP pages is still valuable today.  Oh, and one more thing…don’t get lulled into too much reliance on the the whiz-bang tool to do it for you.  After all, WebControls are just another layer of abstraction, and sometimes you need to dig down through the layers and get a little closer to the native language.

  Read the article

• Opportunities in Development in our Swedish office

  - by anca.rosu

  Hi everyone, my name is Henrik and I joined the JRockit group in 2004. Before that my background was Microsoft, as both a Test Competence lead and as a Program Manager. As an Engineering Manager at Oracle I lead a team of 11 developers. I focus on people management and the daily operations of the department with a heavy focus on interaction and dependencies between the groups and departments here at the Stockholm development site. I also make sure my team deliver on our commitments. I would like to give you a brief summary of the Oracle JRockit team: -The development group in Stockholm delivers several products for the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. Our main products are JRockitVE which allows you to run a Java Virtual Machine without an operating system, the JRockit Java Virtual Machine which is the default jvm for all Oracle middleware products, and the JRockit MissionControl, a set of tools that allows developers to monitor their applications at runtime and perform advanced latency analysis as well as in-production memory leak detection etc. -The office has several departments focusing on different aspects of the product development process, not only to build features and test them but everything from building the infrastructure needed to automatically build and test the products to sustaining engineering that tracks down bugs in customer systems and provide them with patches. Some inspirational lines around what the Oracle JRockit group can offer you in terms of progress, development and learning: - It is a unique chance to get insight and experience building enterprise class software for one of the worlds largest software companies. Here there are almost unlimited possibilities for the right candidate to learn about silicon features and how to implement support for this in software, and to compile optimizations. The position will also give insight into the processes needed to produce software at this level in the industry. If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Technorati Tags: Development,Sweden,Jrockit,Java,Virtual Machine,Oracle Fusion Middleware,software

  Read the article

• Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  You should always have three builds on your team project. These should be setup and tested using an empty solution before you write any code at all. Figure: Three builds named in the format [TeamProject].[AreaPath]_[Branch].[Gate|CI|Nightly] for every branch.   These builds should use the same XAML build workflow; however you may set them up to run a different set of tests depending on the time it takes to run a full build. Gate – Only needs to run the smallest set of tests, but should run most if not all of the Unit Test. This is run before developers are allowed to check-in CI – This should run all Unit Tests and all of the automated UI tests. It is run after a developer check-in. Nightly – The Nightly build should run all of the Unit Tests, all of the Automated UI tests and all of the Load and Performance tests. The nightly build is time consuming and will run but once a night. Packaging of your Product for testing the next day may be done at this stage as well. Figure: You can control what tests are run and what data is collected while they are running. Note: We do not run all the tests every time because of the time consuming nature of running some tests, but ALL tests should be run overnight. Note: If you had a really large project with thousands of tests including long running Load tests you may need to add a Weekly build to the mix.     Figure: Bad example, you can’t tell what these builds do if they are in a larger list   Figure: Good example, you know exactly what project, branch and type of build these are for.   Technorati Tags: SSW,SSW Rules,VS2010,VS ALM,Team Build 2010,Team Build

  Read the article

• Do you know when to send a done email in Scrum?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  At SSW we have always sent done emails to the owner/requestor to let them know that it is done. Others who are dependent on that tasks are CC’ed so they know they can proceed. But how does that fit into Scrum?   Update 14th April 2010 Rule added to Rules to better Scrum with TFS If you are working on a task: When you complete a Task that is part of a User Story you need to send a done email to the Owner of that Story. You only need to add the Task #, Summary and link to the item in WIWA. Remember that all your tasks should be under 4 hours, do spending lots of time on a Done Email for a Task would be counter productive. Add more information if required, for example you may have completed the task a different way than previously discussed.  Make sure that every User Story has an Owner as per the rules. If you are the owner of a story: When you complete a story you should send a comprehensive done email as per the rules when the story had been completed. Make sure you add a list of all of the Tasks that were completed as part of the story and the Done criteria that you completed. If your done criteria says: Built Successfully 30% Code Coverage All tests passed Then add an illustration to show this. Figure: Show that you have met your Done criteria where possible.   This is all designed to help you Scrum Team members (Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Team) validate the quality of the work that has been completed. Remember that you are not DONE until your team says you are done.   Technorati Tags: SSW,Scrum,SSW Rules

  Read the article

• What is a good support knowledge base tool?

  - by Guillaume

  I have been searching for a tool to help my team organize its knowledge for resolving recurring support cases. I know this question will probably be closed, but I'll try my change anyway because I know that I can have some good answers about that. Context: our team is developing and supporting an huge applications (lots of different screens and workflow processes. We already have a good tool for managing our documentation, but we are struggling with support cases. Support action involve often quite a lot of manual steps to fix stuff and the knowledge for these actions is more 'oral transmission' than modern tools. We need an efficient way to store them in a knowledge base to be able to retrieve similar cases based on patterns (a stacktrace, an error message, a component name, a workflow step, ...) and ranked by similarity. Our wiki search is not very powerful when it come to this kind of search and the team members don't want to 'waste' time writing a report that will never be found... Do you know efficient knowledge base tool for this kind of use case ?

  Read the article

• Quantifying the value of refactoring in commercial terms

  - by Myles McDonnell

  Here is the classic scenario; Dev team build a prototype. Business mgmt like it and put it into production. Dev team now have to continue to deliver new features whilst at the same time pay the technical debt accrued when the code base was a prototype. My question is this (forgive me, it's rather open ended); how can the value of the refactoring work be quantified in commercial terms? As developers we can clearly understand and communicate the value in technical terms, such a the removal of code duplication, the simplification of an object model and so on. But this means little to an executive focussed on the commercial elements. What will mean something to this executive is the dev. team being able to deliver requirements at faster velocity. Just making this statement without any metrics that clearly quantify return on investment (increased velocity in return for resource allocated to refactoring) carries little weight. I'm interested to hear from anyone who has had experience, positive or negative, in relation to the above. ----------------- EDIT ---------------- Thanks for the responses so far, all of which I think are good. What I want to develop is a metric that proves (or disproves!) all of these statements. A report that ties velocity to refactoring and shows a positive effect.

  Read the article

• Breadcrumbs in a modern web application, make sense? [on hold]

  - by Xtreme Biker

  I'm currently beginning with the development of a new web application. The whole web application is going to be bookmarkable and all the pages accesible via GET requests and url parameters. Having said that, let's suppose I've got three entities in my application, Customer, Team and City. Each Customer and Team belong to a city and I've got a city-detail page which displays the detail for a concrete city. So next navigation cases are possible: Customers - Customer detail (id=2) - City detail (id=3) Football teams - Team detail (id=5) - City detail (id=3) Cities - City detail (id=3) There are three possible ways of ending up in a city detail view. My question is, does it make sense to implement a breadcrumb to show such a history, having it available in the browser itself? Would it be more appropiate to show a breadcrumb with the last case, no matter where we're coming from (hierarchical breadcrumb)? That's what Jakob Nielsen points out here: Offering users a Hansel-and-Gretel-style history trail is basically useless, because it simply duplicates functionality offered by the Back button, which is the Web’s second-most-used feature. A history trail can also be confusing: users often wander in circles or go to the wrong site sections. Having each point in a confused progression at the top of the current page doesn’t offer much help. Finally, a history trail is useless for users who arrive directly at a page deep within the site. Also, even if the history trail seems the most natural way to implement it, it requires an extra effort to keep the whole track being HTTP a stateless mean.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184  | Next Page >