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  • Victor Grazi, Java Champion!

    - by Tori Wieldt
    Congratulations to Victor Grazi, who has been made a Java Champion! He was nominated by his peers and selected as a Java Champion for his experience as a developer, and his work in the Java and Open Source communities. Grazi is a Java evangelist and serves on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, representing Credit Suisse - the first non-technology vendor on the JCP. He also arranges the NY Java SIG meetings at Credit Suisse's New York campus each month, and he says it has been a valuable networking opportunity. He also is the spec lead for JSR 354, the Java Money and Currency API. Grazi has been building real time financial systems in Java since JDK version 1.02! In 1996, the internet was just starting to happen, Grazi started a dot com called Supermarkets to Go, that provided an on-line shopping presence to supermarkets and grocers. Grazi wrote most of the code, which was a great opportunity for him to learn Java and UI development, as well as database management. Next, he went to work at Bank of NY building a trading system. He studied for Java certification, and he noted that getting his certification was a game changer because it helped him started to learn the nuances of the Java language. He has held other development positions, "You may have noticed that you don't get as much junk mail from Citibank as you used to - that is thanks to one of my projects!" he told us. Grazi joined Credit Suisse in 2005 and is currently Vice President on the central architecture team. Grazi is proud of his open source project, Java Concurrent Animated, a series of animations that visualize the functionality of the components in the java.util.concurrent library. "It has afforded me the opportunity to speak around the globe" and because of it, has discovered that he really enjoys doing public presentations. He is a fine addition to the Java Champions program. The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Nominees are named and selected through a peer review process. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. This interchange may be in the form of technical discussions and/or community-building activities with Oracle's Java Development and Developer Program teams.

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  • What is the etiquette in negotiating payment for a software development job

    - by EpsilonVector
    The reason I'm taking a general business question and localize it to software development is that I'm curious as to whether there are certain trends/etiquette/nuances that are typical to our industry. For example, I can imagine two different attitudes employers may generally have to payment negotiations: 1) we'll give you the best offer so we can't really be flexible about it because we already pretty much gave you everything we can give you, or 2) we'll give him an average offer and give in to a better one if forced to. If you try to play hard ball in the first attitude it'll probably cost you the job because you ask for more than they can give you, however if you don't insist on better payment in the second one you'll get a worse offer. In short, when applying to a typical job in our industry what are the typical attitudes from employers on the offers they give, what is the correct way to ask for a better payment, do these things differ between different types of companies (for example startups vs well entrenched companies), and how do these things differ between different kinds of applicants (graduate vs student)?

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  • Oracle's Vision for the Social-Enabled Enterprise

    - by Peggy Chen
    Register Now Join us for the Webcast. Mon., Sept. 10, 2012 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Join the conversation: #oracle and #socbiz Mark Hurd President, Oracle Thomas Kurian Executive Vice President, Product Development, Oracle Reggie Bradford Senior Vice President, Product Development, Oracle Dear Colleague, Smart companies are developing social media strategies to engage customers, gain brand insights, and transform employee collaboration and recruitment. Oracle is powering this transformation with the most comprehensive enterprise social platform that lets you: Monitor and engage in social conversations Collect and analyze social data Build and grow brands through social media Integrate enterprisewide social functionality into a single system Create rich social applications Join Oracle President Mark Hurd and senior Oracle executives to learn more about Oracle’s vision for the social-enabled enterprise. Register now for this Webcast. Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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  • Effective versus efficient code

    - by Todd Williamson
    TL;DR: Quick and dirty code, or "correct" (insert your definition of this term) code? There is often a tension between "efficient" and "effective" in software development. "Efficient" often means code that is "correct" from the point of view of adhering to standards, using widely-accepted patterns/approaches for structures, regardless of project size, budget, etc. "Effective" is not about being "right", but about getting things done. This often results in code that falls outside the bounds of commonly accepted "correct" standards, usage, etc. Usually the people paying for the development effort have dictated ahead of time what it is that they value more. An organization that lives in a technical space will tend towards the efficient end, others will tend towards the effective. Developers often refuse to compromise their favored approach for the other. In my own experience I have found that people with formal education in software development tend towards the Efficient camp. Those that picked up software development more or less as a tool to get things done tend towards the Effective camp. These camps don't get along very well. When managing a team of developers who are not all in one camp it is challenging. In your own experience, which camp do you land in, and do you find yourself having to justify your approach to others? To management? To other developers?

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  • How Service Component Architecture (SCA) Can Be Incorporated Into Existing Enterprise Systems

    After viewing Rob High’s presentation “The SOA Component Model” hosted on InfoQ.com, I can foresee how Service Component Architecture (SCA) can be incorporated in to an existing enterprise. According to IBM’s DeveloperWorks website, SCA is a set of conditions which outline a model for constructing applications/systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In addition, SCA builds on open standards such as Web services. In the future, I can easily see how some large IT shops could potently divide development teams or work groups up into Component/Data Object Groups, and Standard Development Groups. The Component/Data Object Group would only work on creating and maintaining components that are reused throughout the entire enterprise. The Standard Development Group would work on new and existing projects that incorporate the use of various components to accomplish various business tasks. In my opinion the incorporation of SCA in to any IT department will initially slow down the number of new features developed due to the time needed to create the new and loosely-coupled components. However once a company becomes more mature in its SCA process then the number of program features developed will greatly increase. I feel this is due to the fact that the loosely-coupled components needed in order to add the new features will already be built and ready to incorporate into any new development feature request. References: BEA Systems, Cape Clear Software, IBM, Interface21, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle, Primeton Technologies Ltd, Progress Software, Red Hat Inc., Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software Inc. (2006). Service Component Architecture. Retrieved 11 27, 2011, from DeveloperWorks: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-sca/ High, R. (2007). The SOA Component Model. Retrieved 11 26, 2011, from InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/rob-high-sca-sdo-soa-programming-model

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  • Software development magazines [closed]

    - by Sebastian
    Ive spent the last hour or so browsing the web for professional development magazines. I am mostly interested in the java platform, agile methods, "programming in general" (tutorials on languages or whatever, "hot new stuff" etc) and software craftmanship. My best finding yet was pragpub and maybe MSDN magazine. I am willing to pay and have a Zinio account if anyone knows a magazine about programming that is distributed by them. Ive already browsed a couple of related threads here on stackexchange. ACM and IEEE does not seem relevant, as Im not interested in research articles. Maybe conferences like OOPSLA as somebody mentioned in another thread. PS. I prefer if they are in pdf or readable on kindle or a tablet. DS. BR Sebastian

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  • What are the common mistakes in 'tailored Scrum approaches'?

    - by Clark Gable
    I have seen this before. Management wants to be agile and be scrummified, but does not want to step out of the status quo. My latest observation is no different; here, the Scrum is 'tailored' to the organization; specifically into a weird many-people-process. The diagram showing the different participants. I am putting together a document listing why this will not work. Here are the obvious ones: 1. There are product owner agents (an obvious WTF), who report to the product owner: causing dilution of decision making capability 2. There is a role that looks similar to a manager in the traditional approach - development manager: an obvious attempt at command-and-control model 3. The ScrumMaster's role includes collecting timesheets, which are used to track progress instead of burndown charts: detrimental to agile's efforts to build teams with motivated individuals Leaving the question "how would you convince the management?", my question is more at, "what else do you see as failures in this/similar 'tailored Scrum approaches'? EDIT: The diagram might use a few more details 1. The development manager is not part of the development team, with not very clearly defined responsibilities, except: developer performance assessemnt, recruitment, etc., 2. There are more than two teams (with ScrumMaster+development manager+dev team) with the same product owner for all teams!

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  • Not getting paid for hours you've worked?

    - by Sauron
    So I was reading from a previous thread about App vs Game Development: If it was for you to chose Game Development vs Application Development, which will you chose? Which brought me to this site: EA: The Human Story A lot of it talked about developers working something like 85 hours a week, and not getting paid overtime, or anything. Just getting paid for the 40 hours. Is this normal for most software companies? I mean where I work I'm only an entry level guy but I get overtime, and anything over 40 hours is considered this. But it got me thinking "Holy crap" I could never do that. My FREE time is important to me. But is this commonplace in most software companies? Or is more a rarity to certain types (game development, etc)? Because it got me scared! Like I understand having to put some extra hours in for a project... but like 80! that's ridiculous.

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  • Tracking feature requests for small-scale components

    - by DXM
    I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components. I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself. In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department. What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example... framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share low-level IPC communications framework Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups). Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers. At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right. (I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).

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  • OSCON: Java and a Nice Discount

    - by Tori Wieldt
    Now in its 14th year, OSCON, O'Reilly's annual open source conference, will once again be in Portland, OR on July 16-20, 2012.  Join the world’s open source pioneers, builders, and innovators at the Oregon Convention Center for five intense days to learn about open development, challenge your assumptions, and fire up your brain.With 200+ speakers, 18 tracks, hundreds of technologies, and over 3,000 hackers in attendance, it's a place to learn and network. You’ll find practical tutorials, inspirational keynotes, and a wealth of information on open source languages, platforms, and development. OSCON includes whole track devoted to Java & the JVM, and the list of speakers is impressive. OSCON is where the serious thinkers and doers—and their favorite technologies—converge. And when the day’s sessions are over, join people just like you for some serious fun. Thanks to Java Magazine (you have subscribed to Java Magazine, right? If not, get your free digital subscription now!), you can register for OSCON and save 20% with code JAVAMAG.

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  • Cone of Uncertainty in classic and agile projects

    - by DigiMortal
    David Starr from Scrum.org made interesting session in TechEd Europe 2012 - Implementing Scrum Using Team Foundation Server 2012. One of interesting things for me was how Cone of Uncertainty looks like in agile projects (or how agile methodologies distort the cone we know from waterfall projects). This posting illustrates two cones – one for waterfall and one for agile world. Cone of Uncertainty Cone of Uncertainty was introduced to software development community by Steve McConnell and it visualizes how accurate are our estimates over project timeline. Here is the Cone of Uncertainty when we deal with waterfall and Big Design Up-Front (BDUF). Cone of Uncertainty. Taken from MSDN Library page Estimating. The closer we are to project end the more accurate are our estimates. When project ends we know exactly how much every task took time. As we can see then cone is wide when we usually have to give our estimates – it happens somewhere between Initial Project Concept and Requirements Complete. Don’t ask me why Initial Project Concept is the stage where some companies give their best estimates – they just do it every time and doesn’t learn a thing later. This cone is inevitable for software development and agile methodologies that try to make software world better are also able to change the cone. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects Agile methodologies usually try to avoid BDUF, waterfalls and other things that make all our mistakes highly expensive. Of course, we are not the only ones who make mistakes – don’t also forget our dear customers. Agile methodologies take development as creational work and focus on making it better. One main trick is to focus on small and short iterations. What it means? We are estimating functionalities that are easier for us to understand and implement. Therefore our estimates are more accurate. As we move from few big iterations to many small iterations we also distort and slice Cone of Uncertainty. This is how cone looks when agile methodologies are used. Cone of Uncertainty in agile projects. We have more cones to live with but they are way smaller. I don’t have any numbers to put here because I found any but still this “chart” should give you the point: more smaller iterations cause more but way smaller cones of uncertainty. We can handle these small uncertainties because steps we take to complete small tasks are more predictable and doesn’t grow very often above our heads. One more note. Consider that both of charts given in this posting describe exactly the same phase of same project – just uncertainties are different.

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  • Autoloading Development or Production configs (best practices)

    - by Xeoncross
    When programming sites you usually have one set of config files for the development environment and another set for the production server (or one file with both settings). I am assuming all projects should be handled by version control like git or svn. Manual file transfers (like FTP) is wrong on so many levels. How you enable/disable the correct settings (so that your system knows which ones to use) is a problem for me. Each system I work on just kind of jimmy-rigs a solution. Below are the 3 methods I know of and I am hoping that someone can submit a more elegant solutions. 1) File Based The system loads a folder structure based on the URL requested. /site.com /site.fakeTLD /lib index.php For example, if the url is http://site.com then the system loads the production config files located in the site.com folder. However, if I'm working on the site locally I visit http://site.fakeTLD to work on the local copy of the site. To setup this I edit my hosts file and add site.fakeTLD to point to my own computer (127.0.0.1/localhost) and then create a vhost in apache. So now I can work on the codebase locally and then push to the server without any trouble. The problem is that this is susceptible to a "host" injection attack. So someone loading site.com could set the host to site.fakeTLD and then the system would load my development config files instead of production. 2) Config Based The config files contain on section for development - and one for production. The problem is that each time you go to push your changes to the repo you have to edit the file to specify which set of config options should be used. $use = 'production'; //'development'; This leaves the repo open to human error should one of the developers forget to enable the right setting. 3) File System Check Based All the development machines have an extra empty file called "development.txt" or something. Each time the system loads it checks for this file - if found then it knows it is in development mode - if missing then it knows it is in production mode. Since the file is NEVER ADDED to the repo then it will never be pushed (and checked out) on the production machine. However, this just doesn't feel right and causes a slight slow down since all filesystem checks are slow.

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  • SQLAuthority News – Professional Development and Community

    - by pinaldave
    I was recently invited by Hyderabad Techies to deliver a keynote for their 16-day online session called TECH THUNDERS. This event has been running from May 15 and will continue up to the end of the month May 30). There would be a total of 30 sessions. In every evening of those 16 day, there will be either one or two sessions from several noted industry experts. It is the same group which has received the Microsoft Community Impact Award as the Best User Group in India as for developers. I have never talked about Professional Development before. Even if this was my first time to do so, I still accepted the wonderful challenge for the sake of the thousands of audience who were expected to attend this online event. Time is of the essence; I had 15 minutes to deliver the keynote and open the event. The reason why I was nervous was because I had to cover precisely only 15 minutes- no more, no less. If I had an hour, I would have been very confident because I knew I could do a good job for sure. However, I still needed to open the event as great as it can be even if the time was short. I finally created a 6-slide small presentation. In reality, there were only two pages which had the main contents of my keynote, and the remaining slides were just wrappers and decors. You can download the complete slide deck from here. The image used in the slide deck is a curtsy of blog reader Roger Smith who sent it to me. The slide in which I spent a good amount of time is the slide which talks about Professional Development. The content of the slide is as follows: Today, Technology and You Keep your eyes, ears and senses open – Stay Active! You are not the first one who faced the problem – Search Online! Learn the web – Blogs, Forums and Friends! Trust the Technology, Not Print – Test Everything! Community and You! I had a very little time creating the slide deck as I was busy the whole day doing the Advanced SQL Server Training. I had put together these slides during the tea/coffee break of my session. Though it was just a six-bullet point, I had received quite a few emails right after keynote requesting me to talk more about this subject and share the details of my slide deck. I have talked with the event organizer and he will put the keynote online very soon. The subject of the talk is very simple; it revolves around the community. Time has changed, and Internet has come a long way from where it was many years ago. Now that we are all connected, help via the Internet and useful software is easily available around us. In fact, RSS, Newletters and few other technologies have progressed so much that the help through news is now being delivered to our door steps, instead of going out and seeking them. Sometimes, a simple search online solves a lot of problems of many developers. The community is now the first stop for any developer when he or she needs help or just wants to hang around and share some thoughts. I strongly suggest everybody to be a part of the Tech Community. Be it online, offline community or just a local user group, I strongly advise all of you to get involved. I am active in the Community, and I must say I recommend getting drawn into it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL User Group, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Community

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  • Here's your chance: MOS Feedback Sessions @OOW

    - by cwarticki
    Bring your questions, comments, concerns, opinions, recommendations, enhancement requests and any emotional outbursts!   As I travel the world and speak to thousands of customers, I receive plenty of feedback about My Oracle support.  Come hear directly from the source. Meet Dennis Reno, VP of Customer Portal Experience. The Customer Portal Experience team will host a My Oracle Support Tips and Techniques session and three roundtable feedback sessions at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld. The sessions will include a Hardware Support component, as well as best practices that are sure to benefit all My Oracle Support users. The events planned will give our users the opportunity to learn more about how the My Oracle Support customer portal adds value to the support process and to their business needs. The roundtable feedback sessions will allow customers to meet, give feedback, and share their experiences directly with the team responsible for the customer portal experience. Date Time (PT) Session Name Mon, Oct 1 01:45 PM My Oracle Support: Tips and Techniques for Getting the Best Hardware Support Possible (Session #CON9745) Tue, Oct 2 11:00 AM Roundtable - My Oracle Support General Feedback Wed, Oct 3 11:00 AM Roundtable - My Oracle Support Community Feedback Thr, Oct 4 11:00 AM Roundtable - My Oracle Support General Feedback Customers can find more information, including specific details about how to attend, by accessing My Oracle Support at OpenWorld (Article ID 1484508.1). Enjoy OpenWorld everyone! -Chris Warticki Global Customer Management

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  • Book Review: Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide

    - by Grant Ronald
    Packt Publishing asked me to review Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide by Vinod Krishnan, so on a couple of long flights I managed to get through the book in a couple of sittings. One point to make clear before I go into the review.  Having authored "The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF", I've written a book which covers the same topic/beginner level.  I also think that its worth stating up front that I applaud anyone who has gone  through the effort of writing a technical book. So well done Vinod.  But on to the review: The book itself is a good break down of topic areas.  Vinod starts with a quick tour around the IDE, which is an important step given all the work you do will be through the IDE.  The book then goes through the general path that I tend to always teach: a quick overview demo, ADF BC, validation, binding, UI, task flows and then the various "add on" topics like security, MDS and advanced topics.  So it covers the right topics in, IMO, the right order.  I also think the writing style flows nicely as well - Its a relatively easy book to read, it doesn't get too formal and the "Have a go hero" hands on sections will be useful for many. That said, I did pick out a number of styles/themes to the writing that I found went against the idea of a beginners guide.  For example, in writing my book, I tried to carefully avoid talking about topics not yet covered or not yet relevant at that point in someone's learning.  So, if I was a new ADF developer reading this book, did I really need to know about ADFBindingFilter and DataBindings.cpx file on page 58 - I've only just learned how to do a drag and drop simple application so showing me XML configuration files relevant to JSF/ADF lifecycle is probably going to scare me off! I found this in a couple of places, for example, the security chapter starts on page 219 but by page 222 (and most of the preceding pages are hands-on steps) we're diving into the web.xml, weblogic.xml, adf-config.xml, jsp-config.xml and jazn-data.xml.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't know this, but I feel you have to get people on a strong grounding of the concepts before showing them implementation files.  If having just learned what ADF Security is will "The initialization parameter remove.anonymous.role is set to false for the JpsFilter filter as this filter is the first filter defined in the file" really going to help me? The other theme I found which I felt didn't work was that a couple of the chapters descended into a reference guide.  For example page 159 onwards basically lists UI components and their properties.  And page 87 onwards list the attributes of ADF BC in pretty much the same way as the on line help or developer guide, and I've a personal aversion to any sort of help that says pretty much what the attribute name is e.g. "Precision Rule: this option is used to set a strict precision rule", or "Property Set: this is the property set that has to be applied to the attribute". Hmmm, I think I could have worked that out myself, what I would want to know in a beginners guide are what are these for, what might I use them for...and if I don't need to use them to create an emp/dept example them maybe it’s better to leave them out. All that said, would the book help me - yes it would.  It’s obvious that Vinod knows ADF and his style is relatively easy going and the book covers all that it has to, but I think the book could have done a better job in the educational side of guiding beginners.

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  • Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go?

    - by marcog
    Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this generalisation was bad because it made the solution more complex. One such comment is voted +8. Putting aside the hard-to-explain voting effects on SO, there are two types of complexity to be considered here: Runtime complexity, i.e. how fast does the code run Code complexity, i.e. how difficult is the code to read and understand The question of runtime complexity is something that requires a better understanding of the input data today and what it might look like in the future, taking the various growth factors into account where necessary. The question of code complexity is the one I'm interested in here. By generalising the solution, we avoid having to rewrite it in the event that the constraints change. However, at the same time it can often result in complicating the code. In the reference question, the code for NxN is easy to understand for any competent programmer, but the NxM case (unless documented well) could easily confuse someone coming across the code for the first time. So, my question is this: Where should you draw the line between generalising and keeping the code easy to understand?

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  • Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go?

    - by marcog
    Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this generalisation was bad because it made the solution more complex. One such comment is voted +8. Putting aside the hard-to-explain voting effects on SO, there are two types of complexity to be considered here: Runtime complexity, i.e. how fast does the code run Code complexity, i.e. how difficult is the code to read and understand The question of runtime complexity is something that requires a better understanding of the input data today and what it might look like in the future, taking the various growth factors into account where necessary. The question of code complexity is the one I'm interested in here. By generalising the solution, we avoid having to rewrite it in the event that the constraints change. However, at the same time it can often result in complicating the code. In the reference question, the code for NxN is easy to understand for any competent programmer, but the NxM case (unless documented well) could easily confuse someone coming across the code for the first time. So, my question is this: Where should you draw the line between generalising and keeping the code easy to understand?

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  • Minimum team development sizes

    - by MarkPearl
    Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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  • Incentivizing Work with Development Teams

    - by MarkPearl
    Recently I saw someone on twitter asking about incentives and if anyone had past experience with incentivizing work. I promised to respond with some of the experiences I have had in the past so here goes... **Disclaimer** - these are my experiences with incentives, generally in software development - in some other industries this may not be applicable – this is also my thinking at this point in time, with more experience my opinion may change. Incentivize at the level that you want people to group at If you are wanting to promote a team mentality, incentivize teams. If you want to promote an individual mentality, incentivize individuals. There is nothing worse than mixing this up. Some organizations put a lot of effort in establishing teams and team mentalities but reward individuals. This has a counter effect on the resources they have put towards establishing a team mentality. In the software projects that I work with we want promote cross functional teams that collaborate. Personally, if I was on a team and knew that there was an opportunity to work on a critical component of the system, and that by doing so I would get a bigger bonus, then I would be hesitant to include other people in solving that problem. Thus, I would hinder the teams efforts in being cross functional and reduce collaboration levels. Does that mean everyone in the team should get an even share of an incentive? In most situations I would say yes - even though this may feel counter-intuitive. I have heard arguments put forward that if “person x contributed more than person Y then they should be rewarded more” – This may sound controversial but I would rather treat people how would you like them to perform, not where they currently are at. To add to this approach, if someone is free loading, you bet your bottom dollar that the team is going to make this a lot more transparent if they feel that individual is going to be rewarded at the same level that everyone else is. Bad incentives promote destructive work If you are going to incentivize people, pick you incentives very carefully. I had an experience once with a sales person who was told they would get a bonus provided that they met an ordering target with a particular supplier. What did this person do? They sold everything at cost for the next month or so. They reached the goal, but the company didn't gain anything from it. It was a bad incentive. Expect the same with development teams, if you incentivize zero bug levels, you will get zero code committed to the solution. If you incentivize lines of code, you will get many many lines of bad code. Is there such a thing as a good incentives? Monetary wise, I am not sure there is. I would much rather encourage organizations to pay their people what they are worth upfront. I would also advise against paying money to teams as an incentive or even a bonus or reward for reaching a milestone. Rather have a breakaway for the team that promotes team building as a reward if they reach a milestone than pay them more money. I would also advise against making the incentive the reason for them to reach the milestone. If this becomes the norm it promotes people to begin to only do their job if there is an incentive at the end of the line. This is not a behaviour one wants to encourage. If the team or individual is in the right mind-set, they should not work any harder than they are right now with normal pay.

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  • Some help needed with setting up the PERFECT workflow for web development with 2-3 guys using subver

    - by Roeland
    Hey guys! I run a small web development company along side with my brother and friend. After doing extensive research I have decided on using subversion for version control. Here is how I currently plan on running typical development. Keep in mind there are 3 of us each in a separate location. I set up an account with springloops (springloops.com) subversion hosting. Each time I work on a new project, I create a repository for it. So lets say in this case I am working on site1. I want to have 3 versions of the site on the internet: Web Development - This is the server me and the other developers publish to. (site1.dev.bythepixel.com) Client Preview - This is the server that we update every few days with a good revision for the client to see. (site1.bythepixel.com) Live Site - The site I publish to when going live (site1.com) Each web development machine (at each location) will have a local copy of xamp running virtual host to allow multiple websites to be worked on. The root of the local copy is set up to be the same as the local copy of the subversion repository. This is set up so we can make small tweaks and preview them immediately. When some work has been done, a commit is made to the repository for the site. I will have the dev site automatically be pushed (its an option in springloops). Then, whenever I feel ready to push to the client site I will do so. Now, I have a few concerns with those work flow: I am using codeigniter currently, and in the config file I generally set the root of the site. Ex. http://www.site1.com. So, it looks like each time I publish to one of the internet servers, I will have to modify the config file? Is there any way to make it so certain files are set for each server? So when I hit publish to client preview it just uploads the config file for the client preview server. I don't want the live site , the client preview site and the dev site to share the same mysql server for a variety of reasons. So does this once again mean that I have to adjust the db server info each time I push to a different site? Does this workflow make sense? If you have any suggestion please let me know. I plan for this to be the work flow I use for the next few year. I just need to put a system in place that allows for future expansion! Thanks a bunch!!

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  • Are there any new/updated Java web development frameworks to watch for?

    - by predhme
    I know recently Spring 3.0 was released which brought about a nice new set of features and ease of web development with their MVC package. However are there any new frameworks on the horizon and/or new versions of other frameworks that a web developer should have their eyes on? I heard about the Stripes framework, but it seems as though development has stopped. It also seems grails has a new release coming out as well which that looks like it is just an update to support the new features in the latest groovy release.

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  • Suggest me which web development technology i gotta use?

    - by shyam-daniel
    I am a newbie to the web application development. I have to start with a Framework which will make me grow up higher in my career. So please suggest which technology i have to choose? Lot of technologies for web development is articulating in this field like PHP,JSP,Stuts,JSF,Flex,ColdFusion etc. Give me some suggestions to how to start?

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