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  • Leading an offshore team

    - by Chuck Conway
    I'm in a position where I am leading two teams of 4. Both teams are located in India. I am on the west coast of the U.S. I'm finding leading remote teams challenging: First, their command of the English language is weak. Second, I'm having difficultly understanding them through their accents. Third is timing, we are 12 hours apart. We use Skype to communicate. I have a month to get the project done. We've burned through a week just setting up the environments. At this point I'm considering working their hours, 11p PDT to 7a PDT, to get them up to speed, so that I can get the project off the ground. A 12 hour lag time is too much. I'm looking for steps I can take to be successful at leading an offshore team. Update The offshore team's primary task is coding, of course, most coding tasks do involve some design work. The offshore team's are composed of one lead, 2 mid level (4 to 5 years) developers and a junior (~2 years) developer. The project is classic waterfall. We've handed the offshore team a business and a technical design document. We are trying to manage the offshore in an agile way. We have daily conference calls with them and I'm requiring the teams to send me a daily scrum in the form of an email answering the following questions: What did I do today? What am I going to do tomorrow? What do I need from Chuck so I can do my job tomorrow? There is some ambiguity in the tasks. The intent was to give them enough direction for them to develop the task with out writing the code for them. I don't have a travel budget. I am using Fogbugz to track the tasks. Each task has been entered into Fogbugz and given a priority. Each team member has access to FogBugz and can choose what task they wish to complete. Related question: What can we do to improve the way outsourcing/offshoring works? Update 2 I've decided that I can not talk to the team once a day. I must work with them. Starting tonight I've started working the same hours they are. This makes me available to them when they have questions. It also allows me to gain their trust and respect. Stackoverflow question Leading an offshore team

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  • How do I overcome paralysis by analysis when coding?

    - by LuxuryMode
    When I start a new project, I often times immediately start thinking about the details of implementation. "Where am I gonna put the DataBaseHandler? How should I use it? Should classes that want to use it extend from some Abstract superclass..? Should I an interface? What level of abstraction am I going to use in my class that contains methods for sending requests and parsing data?" I end up stalling for a long time because I want to code for extensibility and reusability. But I feel it almost impossible to get past thinking about how to implement perfectly. And then, if I try to just say "screw it, just get it done!", I hit a brick wall pretty quickly because my code isn't organized, I mixed levels of abstractions, etc. What are some techniques/methods you have for launching into a new project while also setting up a logical/modular structure that will scale well?

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  • Etymology of software project names [closed]

    - by Benoit
    I would like to have a reference community wiki here in order to know what etymology software name have or why they are named that way. I was wondering why Imagemagick's mogrify was named this way. Today I wondered the same for Apache Lucene. It would be handy to have a list here. Could we extend such a list? Let me start and let you edit it please. I will ask for this to be community wiki. For each entry please link to an external reference. GNU Emacs: stand for “Editor MACroS”. Apache Lucene: Armenian name Imagemagick mogrify: from “transmogrify”. Thanks.

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  • Using branchs for a mini project or module of project: Good practice?

    - by TheLQ
    In my repo I have 3 closely related mini projects: 1 server and 2 clients. They are all quite small (<3 files each). Since they are so small and so closely related I just dropped them in folders in one single repo. However now that I know I can't clone a single directory in my VCS of choice (Mercurial), I'm considering splitting them up. However I'm confused about general best practice: Is it okay to put different small projects in different branches, or should they all go in different repos? I'm currently leaning towards branching since I can't easily splice out the file history of the different projects but then your using a feature in a way it wasn't meant to be used.

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  • How important is to sacriface your free time for accomplishing goals? [closed]

    - by Darf Zon
    I was reading a book about XP programming and about agile teams. While I was reading, I saw this scenario. I've never worked with a development team (just in school). So I would like what do you opine on this situation: Your boss has asked you to deliver software in a time that can only be possible to meet the project team asking if you want to work overtime without pay. All team members have young children. Discuss whether it should accept this request from your boss or should persuade the team to give their time to the organization rather than their families. What could be significant factors in the decision? As a programmer, you are offered an upgrade as project manager, but his feeling is that you can have a more effective contribution in a technical role in one administrative. Write when you should accept that promotion. Somethimes, I sacrifice my free time for accomplishing hits at work, so it's very important to me to know your opinion base of your experience.

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  • Separating a "wad of stuff" utility project into individual components with "optional" dependencies

    - by romkyns
    Over the years of using C#/.NET for a bunch of in-house projects, we've had one library grow organically into one huge wad of stuff. It's called "Util", and I'm sure many of you have seen one of these beasts in your careers. Many parts of this library are very much standalone, and could be split up into separate projects (which we'd like to open-source). But there is one major problem that needs to be solved before these can be released as separate libraries. Basically, there are lots and lots of cases of what I might call "optional dependencies" between these libraries. To explain this better, consider some of the modules that are good candidates to become stand-alone libraries. CommandLineParser is for parsing command lines. XmlClassify is for serializing classes to XML. PostBuildCheck performs checks on the compiled assembly and reports a compilation error if they fail. ConsoleColoredString is a library for colored string literals. Lingo is for translating user interfaces. Each of those libraries can be used completely stand-alone, but if they are used together then there are useful extra features to be had. For example, both CommandLineParser and XmlClassify expose post-build checking functionality, which requires PostBuildCheck. Similarly, the CommandLineParser allows option documentation to be provided using the colored string literals, requiring ConsoleColoredString, and it supports translatable documentation via Lingo. So the key distinction is that these are optional features. One can use a command line parser with plain, uncolored strings, without translating the documentation or performing any post-build checks. Or one could make the documentation translatable but still uncolored. Or both colored and translatable. Etc. Looking through this "Util" library, I see that almost all potentially separable libraries have such optional features that tie them to other libraries. If I were to actually require those libraries as dependencies then this wad of stuff isn't really untangled at all: you'd still basically require all the libraries if you want to use just one. Are there any established approaches to managing such optional dependencies in .NET?

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  • managing information/functionality on shared common project classes

    - by ilansch
    In my company, we have a common solution the contains common projects (2 projects so far, one for .net 3.5 and one for .net 4.5). My main problem is that during time, a lot of code is added, for example hosting a process as windows service is a class called ServiceManagement, But no one but the developer knows it, and if someone wants to use this shared class, he does not know it exist. So i am looking for a way to document and manage all the classes with tags, a 3rd party util/web util, that i can search for tags and maybe find common classes that i can use (if we keep all our code well-documented). Does anyone familiar with sort of tools ?

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  • A good example project to 'prove' my skills [closed]

    - by David Archer
    I've been a commercial programmer for about 3 years now but all of my commercial work is based upon PHP (with Cake PHP, Wordpress and Wildfire) and ASP.Net (on C#, including MVC 3, Umbraco and Kentico) as well as plenty of HTML/CSS/jQuery examples to show. A future employer has asked me to show my Ruby on Rails potential. I've done Ruby on Rails before for fun, but nothing worthy of commercial showing. What I'd like to know, from a group of programmers, is what would be a good 'portfolio demo' piece for you? What have you seen in the past that impressed you? What are you looking for? For Ruby lead developers specifically, what sort of things are you looking to see in the code? Cheers!

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  • Weekend Project: Make Your Own Ferromagnetic Fluid

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Experiments this simple and fun give you no reason to leave all science-based goofing off to the professionals: whip up a beaker of ferromagnetic fluid to capture magnetic waves in motion. The premise is simple: by combing a viscous liquid (in this case vegetable oil) with a magnetic powder (in this case MICR copy toner) and introducing a strong magnetic source (such as neodymium rare earth magnets), you can actually see the magnetic waves in physical space. It’s like the old magnetic filings on the table top trick, but in 3D. Check out the video above to see how you can mix up a batch of your own. How to Make Magnetic Fluid [YouTube] What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8 HTG Explains: Why You Shouldn’t Use a Task Killer On Android

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  • How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

    - by Carlos
    I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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  • Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

    - by DigiMortal
       Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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  • Dealing with the customer / developer culture mismatch on an agile project

    - by Eric Smith
    One of the tenets of agile is ... Customer collaboration over contract negotiation ... another one is ... Individuals and interactions over processes and tools But the way I see it, at least when it comes to interaction with the customer, there is a fundamental problem: How the customer thinks is fundamentally different to how a software engineer thinks That may be a bit of a generalisation, yes. Arguably, there are business domains where this is not necessarily true---these are few and far between though. In many domains though, the typical customer is: Interested in daily operational concerns--short-range tactics ... not strategy; Only concerned with the immediate solution; Generally one-dimensional, non-abstract thinkers; Primarily interested in "getting the job done" as opposed to coming up with a lasting, quality solution. On the other hand, software engineers who practice agile are: Professionals who value quality; Individuals who understand the notion of "more haste less speed" i.e., spending a little more time to do things properly will save lots of time down the road; Generally, very experienced analytical thinkers. So very clearly, there is a natural culture discrepancy that tends to inhibit "customer collaboration". What's the best way to address this?

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  • Seeking some advice on pursuing MS in CS from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon or Caltech

    - by avi
    What kinds of projects are given preference in top notch colleges like Stanford, Caltech, etc to get admission into MS programme in Computer Science? I have an average academic portfolio. I'm pursuing Btech from a not so popular university in India with an aggregate of 67%. I'm good at designing algorithms and possess good knowledge of core subjects but helpless with my percentage. So, I think the only way I can impress them is with my project(s). Can anyone please suggest me the kinds of projects that are given preference by such top level institutes? Could you please also suggest some good projects? My area of interest would be Artificial Intelligence or any application/software/algorithm design which could be of some help to common people. Or if you have any other random idea for my project then please share it with me. Note: Web based projects and management projects like lib management wouldn't be my priority.

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  • Simple project - make a 3D box tumble and fall to the ground [closed]

    - by Dominic Bou-Samra
    Possible Duplicate: Resources to learn programming rigid body simulation Hi guys, I want to try learning rigid-body dynamic simulation. I have done a fluid and cloth simulation before, but never anything rigid. My maths knowledge is limited in that I don't know the notation that well. Are there any good cliff-notes, tutorials, guides on how I would accomplish a simple task like this? I don't want a super complex pdf that's only a little relevant. Thanks.

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  • Releasing a project under GPL v2 or later without the source code of libraries

    - by Luciano Silveira
    I wrote a system in Java that I want to release under the terms of GPL v2 or later. I've used Apache Maven to deal with all the dependencies of the system, so I don't have the source code of any of the libraries used. I've already checked, all the libraries were released under GPL-compatible licenses (Apache v2, 3-clause BSD, MIT, LGPL v2 and v2.1). I have 3 questions about this scenario: 1) Can I release a package with only the binaries of code I wrote, not including the libraries, and distribute only the source code I wrote? 2) Can I release a package with all the binaries, including the libraries, and distribute only the source code I wrote? 3) Can I release a package with all the binaries, including the libraries, and distribute only the source code I wrote plus the source code of the libraries licensed under the LGPL license?

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  • Guiding Management to the Correct Decision

    - by Blumer
    My supervisor (also a developer) and I have a running joke about writing a book called "Managing From Beneath: Subversively Guiding Management to the Right Decision" and including a number of "techniques" we've developed for helping those who make the decisions to make the right ones. So far, we've got (cynicism warning!): BIC It! BIC stands for "Bury In Committee." When a bad idea comes up that someone wants to champion, we try to get it deferred to a committee for input. Typically it will either get killed outright (especially if other members of the committee are competing for you as a resource), or it will be hung up long enough that the proponent forgets about it. Smart, Stupid, or Expensive? When someone gets a visionary idea, offer them three ways to do it: a smart way, a stupid way, and an expensive way. The hope is that you've at least got a 2/3 shot of not having to do it the way that makes a piece of your soul die. All-Pro. It's a preemptive pro/con list in which you get into the mind of the (pr)opponent and think what would be cons against doing it your way. Twist them into pros and present them in your pro list before they have a chance to present them as cons. Dependicitis. Link pending decisions together, ideally with the proponent's pet project as the final link in the chain. Use this leverage to force action on those that have been put off. Preemptive Acceptance. Sometimes it's clear that management is going to go a particular direction regardless of advice to the contrary, and it's time to make the best of it. Take the opportunity to get something else you need, though. Approach the sponsor out of the blue and take the first step: "You know, I've been thinking about it, and while it's not the route I would advise, as long as we can get the schedule and budget for Project Awesome loosened up, I can work some magic to make your project fly." So ... what techniques have you come up with to try to head off the problem projects or make the best of what may come?

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  • How do you manage feature requests and software changes?

    - by 0A0D
    I am a Software Engineer and over the past few years I have become the de-facto software project manager simply because there isn't one. So to keep our sanity in the R&D/Engineering department, customers have become accustomed to coming to me with their requests. I have no experience in this realm so it is my first time acting as a project manager for software projects. I have managed other things but not software. So, how do you manage software projects and mark priorities? Requests come in at infrequent intervals so we very well could be working on something for someone else and then another person comes in with a "rush" job that needs working on. Is it easier to just say First Come, First Serve or is it the person with the most money?

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  • How should I manage a team with different skill levels?

    - by Jon Purdy
    I'll be working on a software project with some friends of mine, and I've been appointed technical lead. None of these guys is a bad programmer at all, but I do have significantly more experience than them. I need to be able to distribute the work among everyone on the team, while also making sure that we don't tread on one another's toes; that they meet the relatively high standards of quality and scalability that we need to make this project successful, without requiring me to review everything they commit. How should I maintain standards while avoiding micromanagement? Is it enough to make some diagrams, schedule some code reviews, and trust that I'll be able to fix anything that they might break, or should I go the TDD route and write explicit tests for the team to satisfy?

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  • How to make a great functional specification

    - by sfrj
    I am going to start a little side project very soon, but this time i want to do not just the little UML domain model and case diagrams i often do before programming, i thought about making a full functional specification. Is there anybody that has experience writing functional specifications that could recommend me what i need to add to it? How would be the best way to start preparing it? Here i will write down the topics that i think are more relevant: Purpose Functional Overview Context Diagram Critical Project Success Factors Scope (In & Out) Assumptions Actors (Data Sources, System Actors) Use Case Diagram Process Flow Diagram Activity Diagram Security Requirements Performance Requirements Special Requirements Business Rules Domain Model (Data model) Flow Scenarios (Success, alternate…) Time Schedule (Task Management) Goals System Requirements Expected Expenses What do you think about those topics? Shall i add something else? or maybe remove something?

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  • What use is a Business Logic Layer (BLL)?

    - by Andrew S. Arnold
    In reading up on good practice for database applications I've frequently come across advocates of so-called "business logic layers" and I'm trying to decide if it's best for my project to use one (it's a small personal project). My issue lies in the fact that I can't think of anything for the BLL to do that the DAL can't already handle (executing queries and mapping results to objects), so my BLL just calls the DAL without doing anything itself. Maybe I'm wrong about exactly what the DAL should be doing too. But regardless, what sorts of functionality should be expected of a BLL in a database management application?

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  • Auto-generate Visual Studio Project Documentation with GhostDoc

    GhostDoc is a free Visual Studio extension that automates the process of writing code comments. Find out how you can use it to document your code automatically....Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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