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• Why do large IT projects tend to fail or have big cost/schedule overruns?

  - by Pratik

  I always read about large scale transformation or integration project that are total or almost total disaster. Even if they somehow manage to succeed the cost and schedule blow out is enormous. What is the real reason behind large projects being more prone to failure. Can agile be used in these sort of projects or traditional approach is still the best. One example from Australia is the Queensland Payroll project where they changed test success criteria to deliver the project. See some more failed projects in this SO question Have you got any personal experience to share?

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• Is committing/checking code everyday a good practice?

  - by ArtB

  I've been reading Martin Fowler's note on Continuous Integration and he lists as a must "Everyone Commits To the Mainline Every Day". I do not like to commit code unless the section I'm working on is complete and that in practice I commit my code every three days: one day to investigate/reproduce the task and make some preliminary changes, a second day to complete the changes, and a third day to write the tests and clean it up^ for submission. I would not feel comfortable submitting the code sooner. Now, I pull changes from the repository and integrate them locally usually twice a day, but I do not commit that often unless I can carve out a smaller piece of work. Question: is committing everyday such a good practice that I should change my workflow to accomodate it, or it is not that advisable? ^ The order is more arbitrary and depends on the task, my point was to illustrate the time span and activities, not the exact sequence.

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• null values vs "empty" singleton for optional fields

  - by Uko

  First of all I'm developing a parser for an XML-based format for 3D graphics called XGL. But this question can be applied to any situation when you have fields in your class that are optional i.e. the value of this field can be missing. As I was taking a Scala course on coursera there was an interesting pattern when you create an abstract class with all the methods you need and then create a normal fully functional subclass and an "empty" singleton subclass that always returns false for isEmpty method and throws exceptions for the other ones. So my question is: is it better to just assign null if the optional field's value is missing or make a hierarchy described above and assign it an empty singleton implementation?

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• Mono is frequently used to say "Yes, .NET is cross-platform". How valid is that claim?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  In What would you choose for your project between .NET and Java at this point in time? I say that I would consider the "Will you always deploy to Windows?" the single most important (EDIT: technical) decision to make up front in a new web project, and if the answer is "no", I would recommend Java instead of .NET. A very common counter-argument is that "If we ever want to run on Linux/OS X/Whatever, we'll just run Mono", which is a very compelling argument on the surface, but I don't agree for several reasons. OpenJDK and all the vendor supplied JVM's have passed the official Sun TCK ensuring things work correctly. I am not aware of Mono passing a Microsoft TCK. Mono trails the .NET releases. What .NET-level is currently fully supported? Does all GUI elements (WinForms?) work correctly in Mono? Businesses may not want to depend on Open Source frameworks as the official plan B. I am aware that with the new governance of Java by Oracle, the future is unsafe, but e.g. IBM provides JDK's for many platforms, including Linux. They are just not open sourced. So, under which circumstances is Mono a valid business strategy for .NET-applications? Edit: Mark H summarized it as: "If the claim is that "I have a windows application written in .NET, it should run on mono", then not, it's not a valid claim - but Mono has made efforts to make porting such applications simpler.".

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• Is it better to build HTML Code string on the server or on the client side?

  - by Ionut

  The result of the following process should be a html form. This form's structure varies from one to user. For example there might be a different number of rows or there may be the need for rowspan and colspan. When the user chooses to see this table an ajax call is made to the server where the structure of the table is decided from the database. Then I have to create the html code for the table structure which will be inserted in the DOM via JavaScript. The following problem comes to my mind: Where should I build the HTML code which will be inserted in the DOM? On the server side or should I send some parameters in the ajax call method and process the structure there? Therefore the main question involves good practice when it comes to decide between Server side processing or client side processing. Thank you!

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• How should I make progress further as a programmer?

  - by mushfiq

  Hello, I have just left my college after doing graduation in computer engineering,during my college life I tried to do some freelancing in local market.I succeeded in the last year and earned some small amounts based on joomla,wordpress and visual basic based job.I had some small projects on php,mysql also. After finishing my undergrad life,I sat for an written test for post of python programmer and luckily I got the job and is working there(Its a small software firm do most of the task in python).Day by day I have gained some experience with core python. Meanwhile an USA based web service firm called me for the interview and after finishing three steps(oral+mini coding project+final oral)they selected me(i was wondered!).And I am going to join their with in few days.There I have to work in python(based on Django framework,I know only basic of this framework). My problem is when I started to work with python simultaneously I worked in Odesk as a wordpress,joomla,drupal,php developer. Now a days I am feeling that I am getting "Jack of all trades master of none". My current situation is i am familiar with several popular web technologies but not an expert.I want to make myself skilled. How should I organize myself to be a skilled web programmer?

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• How to show an "or includes" relationship - UML Use case diagram

  - by TheNewBlack

  I haven't come across this issue before and can't find it in my Schaum's Outline UML book and was wondering if someone here could help. I'm making a use case diagram for e-commerce, and in it I want to describe that in order to add a book to your shopping basket, you have to either search products (using the websites search engine) or browse products (using navigation). But the thing is that it can be either one, and not both. Is there a way to show that adding a product to the basket needs to include either this or that? Because otherwise it would look like it needs to include both. Or should I join the two use cases (search products and browse products) into one?

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• How does copyrights apply to source code header files?

  - by Jim McKeeth

  It seems I heard that header files are not considered copyrightable since they can only be written one way (like a list of ingredients or facts). So a header file for a specific DLL will always look the same when written in a given programming language. Unfortunately I can't find any resources to back this up. So if a vendor provides an SDK with headers in one programming language, and then those headers are translated into another programming language by a third party. Does the 3rd party need permission from the vendor to provide the header translation? Who owns the copyright on the translation? Isn't it a derivative work still owned by the vendor, or is there no copyright, like a list of ingredients? Does this vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?

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• How to handle bugs that I think I fixed, but I'm not entirely sure

  - by vsz

  There are some types of bugs which are very hard to reproduce, happen very rarely and seemingly by random. It can happen, that I find a possible cause, fix it, test the program, and can't reproduce the bug. However, as it was impossible to reliably reproduce the bug and it happened so rarely, how can I indicate this in a bugtracker? What is the common way of doing it? If I set the status to fixed, and the solution to fixed, it would mean something completely fixed, wouldn't it? Is it common practice to set the status to fixed and the solution to open, to indicate to the testers, that "it's probably fixed, but needs more attention to make sure" ? Edit: most (if not all) bugtrackers have two properties for the status of a bug, maybe the names are not the same. By status I mean new, assigned, fixed, closed, etc., and by solution I mean open (new), fixed, unsolvable, not reproducible, duplicate, not a bug, etc.

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• What counts as reinventing the wheel?

  - by dsimcha

  Do the following scenarios count as "reinventing the wheel" in your book? A solution exists, but not in the language you want to use, and existing solutions can't be interfaced with the language you want to use in a clean, idiomatic way. In principle you could get an existing library to do what you wanted with heavy modification, but you think it would probably be easier to just start from scratch. What you're writing has the same one-line description as stuff that's already been done, but you're targeting a different niche. For example, maybe your problem has been solved a zillion times before, but in a way that's inefficient for large datasets and your code works well for large datasets.

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• Initialized variables vs named constants

  - by Mike

  I'm working on a fundamental programming class in college and our textbook is "programming logic and design" by joyce farrell(spelling?) Anyhow, I'm struggling conceptually when it comes to initialized variables and named constants. Our class is focusing on pseudo-code for the time being and not one particular language so let me illustrate what I'm talking about. Let's say I am declaring a variable named "myVar" and the data type is numeric: num myVar now I want to initialize it (I don't understand this concept) starting with the number 5 num myVar = 5 how is that any different than creating a named constant?

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• Improve the business logic

  - by Victor

  In my application,I have a feature like this: The user wants to add a new address to the database. Before adding the address, he needs to perform a search(using input parameters like country,city,street etc) and when the list comes up, he will manually check if the address he wants to add is present or not. If present, he will not add the address. Is there a way to make this process better. maybe somehow eliminate a step, avoid need for manual verification etc.

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• Are Intel compilers really better than Microsoft ones?

  - by Rocket Surgeon

  Years ago I was surprised when discovered that Intel sells Studio compatible compilers. I tried it in particular for C/C++ as well as fantastic diagnostic tools. But the code was simply not that computationally intensive to notice the difference. The only impression was: did Intel really did it for me just now, Wow, amazing tools with nanoseconds resolution, unbeleivable. But the trial ended and team never seriously considered a purchase. From your experience, if license cost does not matter, which vendor is a winner ? It is not broad or vague question or attemt to spark a holy war. This sort of question about 2 very visible tools. Nobody likes when tools have any mysteries or surprises. And choices between best and best are always the pain. I also understand the "grass greener" argument. I want to hear all "what ifs" stories. What if Intel just locally optimizes it for the chip stepping of the month, and not every hardware target will actually work as well as Microsoft compiled ? What if AMD hardware is the target and everything will slow down for no reason ? Or on other hand, what if Intel's hardware has so many unnoticable opportunities, that Microsoft compiler writers are too slow to adopt and never implement in the compiler ? What if both are the same exactly, actually a single codebase just wrapped into 2 different boxes and licensed to both vendors by some 3rd party shop? And so on. But someone knows some answers.

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• Music Notation Editor - Refactoring view creation logic elseware

  - by Cyril Silverman

  Let me preface by saying that knowing some elementary music theory and music notation may be helpful in grasping the problem at hand. I'm currently building a Music Notation and Tablature Editor (in Javascript). But I've come to a point where the core parts of the program are more or less there. All functionality I plan to add at this point will really build off the foundation that I've created. As a result, I want to refactor to really solidify my code. I'm using an API called VexFlow to render notation. Basically I pass the parts of the editor's state to VexFlow to build the graphical representation of the score. Here is a rough and stripped down UML diagram showing you the outline of my program: In essence, a Part has many Measures which has many Notes which has many NoteItems (yes, this is semantically weird, as a chord is represented as a Note with multiple NoteItems, individual pitches or fret positions). All of the relationships are bi-directional. There are a few problems with my design because my Measure class contains the majority of the entire application view logic. The class holds the data about all VexFlow objects (the graphical representation of the score). It contains the graphical Staff object and the graphical notes. (Shouldn't these be placed somewhere else in the program?) While VexFlowFactory deals with actual creation (and some processing) of most of the VexFlow objects, Measure still "directs" the creation of all the objects and what order they are supposed to be created in for both the VexFlowStaff and VexFlowNotes. I'm not looking for a specific answer as you'd need a much deeper understanding of my code. Just a general direction to go in. Here's a thought I had, create an MeasureView/NoteView/PartView classes that contains the basic VexFlow objects for each class in addition to any extraneous logic for it's creation? but where would these views be contained? Do I create a ScoreView that is a parallel graphical representation of everything? So that ScoreView.render() would cascade down PartView and call render for each PartView and casade down into each MeasureView, etc. Again, I just have no idea what direction to go in. The more I think about it, the more ways to go seem to pop into my head. I tried to be as concise and simplistic as possible while still getting my problem across. Please feel free to ask me any questions if anything is unclear. It's quite a struggle trying to dumb down a complicated problem to its core parts.

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• Reading mp3 metadata?

  - by Blaze

  I am planing on writing an application using Vala. Its purposed is to import mp3 files from a location and rename them if necessary. The renaming information should be provided by the ID3 tags in the mp3 file such as the title and the number of the song. My target platform is Ubuntu (Linux). As the question says, I am searching for how can I achieve this on Vala. I think this functionality might be provided by Gstreamer.

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• OOP oriented PHP app source code samples and advice

  - by abel

  The day I have been dreading has arrived. I never felt OOP or good software design was important(I knew they were important, but I thought I could manage without them.). However having read otherwise almost everywhere on the interwebs, I started dreading the day when my client would ask me for new features in an existing app. The day has come and the pain is unbearable! I have never coded my PHP websites "properly"(PHP is my primary language and the bulk of my work. I am learning Python (using web2py)) I take care that the website doesn't fall apart in a daily use scenario. I code pages like I was creating a list of static html files with bits of "magic code" in each of them(this bugs me a lot). How do I make the whole app more or less a single object? For eg. How do I design the object model for an invoicing app? I use a lot of functions for doing any particular thing in the same fashion throughout the app(for eg. validation, generating ids, calculating taxes etc.). I know the basics of OOP in general. Can anyone point me to source code samples of functional apps written in php? Or can someone provide pointers so I can recode my existing apps in a more modular way.

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• How would you gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  I'm relatively new to StackExchange and not sure if it's appropriate place to ask design question. Site gives me a hint "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed". Please let me know. Anyway.. One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting? Thank you very much in advance for your thoughts.

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• How to drastically improve code coverage?

  - by Peter Kofler

  I'm tasked with getting a legacy application under unit test. First some background about the application: It's a 600k LOC Java RCP code base with these major problems massive code duplication no encapsulation, most private data is accessible from outside, some of the business data also made singletons so it's not just changeable from outside but also from everywhere. no business model, business data is stored in Object[] and double[][], so no OO. There is a good regression test suite and an efficient QA team is testing and finding bugs. I know the techniques how to get it under test from classic books, e.g. Michael Feathers, but that's too slow. As there is a working regression test system I'm not afraid to aggressively refactor the system to allow unit tests to be written. How should I start to attack the problem to get some coverage quickly, so I'm able to show progress to management (and in fact to start earning from safety net of JUnit tests)? I do not want to employ tools to generate regression test suites, e.g. AgitarOne, because these tests do not test if something is correct.

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• How do you name your personal libraries?

  - by Mehrdad

  I'm pretty bad with naming things. The only name I can every generically come up with is 'helper'. Say, if I have a header file that contains helping functions for manipulating paths, I tend to put it inside my "helper" directory and call it "path-helper.hpp" or something like that. Obviouslly, that's a bad naming convention. :) I want to have a consistent naming scheme for my folder (and namespace) which I can use to always refer to my own headers and libraries, but I have trouble finding names that are easy to type or remember (like boost)... so I end up calling some of them "helper" or "stdext" or whatnot, which isn't a great idea. How do you find names for your libraries that are easy to remember and easy to type, and which aren't too generic (like "helper" or "std" or "stdext" or the like)? Any suggestions on how to go about doing this?

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• Using PHP version 5.2 or 5.3 for end-user commercial products?

  - by Ash

  I'm doing research on what version of PHP to use when creating commercial scripts that will be sold to end users. Although the available stats aren't great, PHP 5.3 shows a 18.5% adoption rate. I'd like to use Symfony to create these scripts and it requires 5.3.2 which shows an even lower adoption rate (roughly 13% of that 18.5% use less than 5.3.2). Would I be risking much by jumping straight to PHP 5.3.2+ or should I ignore the stats and plough ahead?

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• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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• How are you using CFThread in ColdFusion Applications?

  - by marc esher

  I'm presenting on Concurrency in ColdFusion at CFObjective this year, and I'd like to hear how you're using CFThread in your ColdFusion applications. In addition, what problems have you had while using it, and how (if at all) have you solved them? What do you dislike about CFThread? Have you run into significant weaknesses with CFThread or other problems where it simply could not do what you wanted to do? Finally, if there's anything you'd like to add related to concurrency in CF, not specifically related to CFThread, please do tell.

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• An adequate message authentication code for REST

  - by Andras Zoltan

  My REST service currently uses SCRAM authentication to issue tokens for callers and users. We have the ability to revoke caller privileges and ban IPs, as well as impose quotas to any type of request. One thing that I haven't implemented, however, is MAC for requests. As I've thought about it more, for some requests I think this is needed, because otherwise tokens can be stolen and before we identify this and deactivate the associated caller account, some damage could be done to our user accounts. In many systems the MAC is generated from the body or query string of the request, however this is difficult to implement as I'm using the ASP.Net Web API and don't want to read the body twice. Equally importantly I want to keep it simple for callers to access the service. So what I'm thinking is to have a MAC calculated on: the url, possibly minus query string the verb the request ip (potentially is a barrier on some mobile devices though) utc date and time when the client issues the request. For the last one I would have the client send that string in a request header, of course - and I can use it to decide whether the request is 'fresh' enough. My thinking is that whilst this doesn't prevent message body tampering it does prevent using a model request to use as a template for different requests later on by a malicious third party. I believe only the most aggressive man in the middle attack would be able to subvert this, and I don't think our services offer any information or ability that is valuable enough to warrant that. The services will use SSL as well, for sensitive stuff. And if I do this, then I'll be using HMAC-SHA-256 and issuing private keys for HMAC appropriately. Does this sound enough? Have I missed anything? I don't think I'm a beginner when it comes to security, but when working on it I always. am shrouded in doubt, so I appreciate having this community to call upon!

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• How to make Unit Tests to make sure stored procedure is deleting row from the database?

  - by aspdotnetuser

  I'm new to unit testing and I need some help with the following. I have created a small project to help me learn how to make Unit Tests. The functionality for one of the forms in my application deletes a user from the User table (and other rows in mapping tables). Currently, the unit test I have created to test this sets up the required objects and then calls the business rules method (passing in the user id) which calls the data access method to execute the stored procedure that deletes the rows in the tables. Is this the correct method to test whether something is being deleted successfully? Should the unit test / setup method first insert some test data which the unit test then deletes?

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• UML Diagrams of Multi-Threaded Applications

  - by PersonalNexus

  For single-threaded applications I like to use class diagrams to get an overview of the architecture of that application. This type of diagram, however, hasn’t been very helpful when trying to understand heavily multi-threaded/concurrent applications, for instance because different instances of a class "live" on different threads (meaning accessing an instance is save only from the one thread it lives on). Consequently, associations between classes don’t necessarily mean that I can call methods on those objects, but instead I have to make that call on the target object's thread. Most literature I have dug up on the topic such as Designing Concurrent, Distributed, and Real-Time Applications with UML by Hassan Gomaa had some nice ideas, such as drawing thread boundaries into object diagrams, but overall seemed a bit too academic and wordy to be really useful. I don’t want to use these diagrams as a high-level view of the problem domain, but rather as a detailed description of my classes/objects, their interactions and the limitations due to thread-boundaries I mentioned above. I would therefore like to know: What types of diagrams have you found to be most helpful in understanding multi-threaded applications? Are there any extensions to classic UML that take into account the peculiarities of multi-threaded applications, e.g. through annotations illustrating that some objects might live in a certain thread while others have no thread-affinity; some fields of an object may be read from any thread, but written to only from one; some methods are synchronous and return a result while others are asynchronous that get requests queued up and return results for instance via a callback on a different thread.

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