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• New website - best practice for requirements specs? [closed]

  - by Alex K.

  Possible Duplicate: Extracting user requirements from a person who does not know how to express himself As a hobby freelancer I'm new to this. I've never had a non-technical client before explain to me what his future website is supposed to do. A person wants me to make a website for him and he basically explained to me what's it about. However, he's not a technical person and he just doesn't understand what I need to know and how to properly describe/explain it to me. When I ask him how a user is supposed to submit an entry to the website he told me "He fills out a form.", which is not really helping me. This was just an example, it goes on for other sections of the website as well which are a lot harder to explain. The website will be aimed at a specific professional user demographic and I have no clue about their profession and how their industry works. I tried to find some good Product Requirements Document templates on Google but none of them really seemed like they could help him understand how to write it so I can understand what he wants/needs. Can somebody please give me a hint on how to deal with such non-technical clients?

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• Will SRS be sufficient enough for the programmers to do their work, without the additional overhead of FS?

  - by SixSickSix

  We always make 2 documents the SRS (Software Requirement Specification) and the FS (Functional Specifications) documents for the coders aka programmers. As I have examined the SRS is more like containing both functional and non-functional requirements as compared to the FS that deals only with the functional requirements. To cut it short will the SRS be sufficient enough for the programmers to do their work? and not make any FS anymore?

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• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance. Edit: Thanks for the information. Does anybody know of any alternatives to what has been mentioned so far (NUnit, RhinoMocks and CodedUI)?

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• How do I hire testers by giving them a buggy app for testing their efficiency?

  - by Jay

  My boss wants to recruit testers based on their testing efficiency (number of bugs identified). So, he's shortlisted 5 people and I need to give them an app full of bugs and see how they fare in reporting obvious bugs, and hidden bugs. I know.... it kind of sounds weird. I guess, this is just like the coding world, where you hire a programmer by assessing his/her programming ability (which is a little easier). Once hired, these testers would be testing a java swing app, so their familiarity of testing frameworks/tools is not really required. So, my question here is - How do I go about finding buggy apps (web/non-web), preferably java ones, that I can have the shortlisted testers have a go at? How would you go about this task if your boss asks you to do so? I am kind of clueless at this point - I googled a bit, thought about finding new apps on sourceforge with lots of bugs, but both approaches didn't work for me.

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• Can/should one record unstructured suggestions and feedback in an issue tracker?

  - by Ian Mackinnon

  I'd like to advocate the use of issue-tracking software within an organisation that currently does not use it. But there's one aspect of their situation for which I'm unsure of what to suggest: their projects frequently receive informal verbal feedback or casual comments in meetings or in passing from a wide group of interested parties, and all this information needs to be recorded. Most of these messages are noise, but they're vital to record and share with developers for two reasons: Good suggestions often come out of this process. It can be necessary to have evidence of clients' comments when they forget previous instructions or change their mind. Is this the sort of information that should be stored in an issue-tracking system, or kept apart in a separate solution? Are there issue-tracking systems that have particularly good support for this sort of unstructured information?

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• Tips/tricks to manage a new team with new code

  - by Fanatic23

  How do you handle yourself in a new team where you are the senior most developer and most others in the team are junior to you by several years. The task ahead of the team is something nobody else including you has accomplished in their career before. Management insists on higher productivity of the whole team, and as senior developer you are responsible. Any tips for coming out trumps in a situation like this? Clearly, the entire team needs time to learn and let's not forget the team's new. However, deadlines are up ahead as well...

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• What level/format of access should be given to a client to the issue tracking system?

  - by dukeofgaming

  So, I used to think that it would be a good idea to give the customer access to the issue tracking system, but now I've seen that it creates less than ideal situations, like: Customer judging progress solely on ticket count Developers denied to add issues to avoid customer thinking that there is less progress Customer appointing people on their side to add issues who don't always do a good job (lots of duplicate issues, insufficient information to reproduce, and other things that distract people from doing their real job) However, I think customers should have access to some indicators or proof that there is progress being done, as well as a right to report bugs. So, what would be the ideal solution to this situation?, specially, getting out of or improving the first situation described?

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• Are there any additional considerations to make when designing a site structure if you plan to use persistent connection technologies?

  - by Psytronic

  As the title states, I'm thinking of making a simple-card-game based website, using persistent connection technology (Something like signalR) for the actual game part of it. I've never planned a site to use this technology, and wondering for those who have, are there any additional things that need to be taken into consideration for the site structure? I'm planning on using the asp MVC framework for the whole thing, and starting off with some simple game (e.g. card based Rock/Paper/Scissors) for proof of concept (to see if I can get it working how I think it would in my head).

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• What are some good seminar topics that can be used to improve designer&developer communication?

  - by tactoth

  Hello guys the thing I'll tell is what happens in the company I work for but I know it's more like a common issue in software companies. I'm development team leader in a internet service company that provides service that's very similar to dropbox. In our company we have mainly two divisions: the tech division and the designers division, both have their own reporting hierarchy. Designers focus on designing UI and prioritizing features, while developers focus on implement designers' ideas (more like being driven as our big boss has said). Then here comes our issue: the DEV team and DES team communicate very bad. DEV complain DES for these reasons: Too frequent changing of requirements Too complicated interaction (our DEV team has actually learned many HCI principles) Documents for design are incomplete, usually you just get 'design principles' and it's up to DEV to complete design details. When you find design defects, you ask DES team to resolve them, then DES team quickly change the principles and you gonna spend another several weeks because the change is so fundamental. While DES complain DEV for these reasons: Code architecture is not good enough to adapt to changing requirements (Obviously DES knows something about software development) Product design is about principles, not details. DEV fails to realize this. Communication should be quick and should be mainly oral. Trying to make most feature discussion in document for reference is too overloaded and doesn't make sense. As you can see, DEV and DES have different ideas on product design, and encourages very different practice. We have this difference because of the way we work. So our solution is that we should plan some seminars to make each part more aware of the way the other part work. Then my question is, what are some good topics for such seminars? Guessing some people may not think seminars can solve this problem, please also suggest your solution.

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• How to keep a big and complex software product maintainable over the years?

  - by chrmue

  I have been working as a software developer for many years now. It has been my experience that projects get more complex and unmaintainable as more developers get involved in the development of the product. It seems that software at a certain stage of development has the tendency to get "hackier" and "hackier" especially when none of the team members that defined the architecture work at the company any more. I find it frustrating that a developer who has to change something has a hard time getting the big picture of the architecture. Therefore, there is a tendency to fix problems or make changes in a way that works against the original architecture. The result is code that gets more and more complex and even harder to understand. Is there any helpful advice on how to keep source code really maintainable over the years?

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• What are interesting research questions with regards to open source software development? [closed]

  - by Aron Lindberg

  Imagine you have funding for a team of social scientists to study open source software development for a number of years (long time in software development, I know, but a short time for scientific research). These scientists have competencies to investigate psychological and sociological aspects of open source software development (i.e. how coders think, feel, and behave, along with how communities work or do not work). They are also technically equipped to understand code and coding, have access to all sorts of statistical and machine learning techniques, however their focus is on social aspects of open source software development, not technical. For you, as an open source software developer, what would be the research questions that would be interesting for you to have answered by such a group of scientists?

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• Should we encourage coding styles in favor of developer's autonomy, or discourage it in favor of consistency?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  A developer writes if/else blocks with one-line code statements like: if (condition) // Do this one-line code else // Do this one-line code Another uses curly braces for all of them: if (condition) { // Do this one-line code } else { // Do this one-line code } A developer first instantiates an object, then uses it: HelperClass helper = new HelperClass(); helper.DoSomething(); Another developer instantiates and uses the object in one line: new HelperClass().DoSomething(); A developer is more easy with arrays, and for loops: string[] ordinals = new string[] {'First', 'Second', 'Third'}; for (i = 0; i < ordinals.Length; i++) { // Do something } Another writes: List<string> ordinals = new List<string>() {'First', 'Second', 'Third'}; foreach (string ordinal in ordinals) { // Do something } I'm sure that you know what I'm talking about. I call it coding style (cause I don't know what it's called). But whatever we call it, is it good or bad? Does encouraging it have an effect of higher productivity of developers? Should we ask developers to try to write code the way we tell them, so to make the whole system become style-consistent?

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• (idea) Add Gubuntu (pure Gnome 3) to the list of Ubuntu Desktop Version

  - by squallbayu

  Ubuntu has announced his own 'shell' called unity. I myself have the idea that Ubuntu adds a new list for his desktop version with Gubuntu, a pure Gnome 3.0 on Ubuntu (just like Kubuntu). so the entire list of Ubuntu Natty tomorrow maybe like this : Ubuntu 10.04 (unity) Gubuntu 10:04 (pure Gnome 3.0) Kubuntu 10:04 Xubuntu 10:04 Lubuntu 10:04 Edubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Actually, I myself prefer a version that looks like this : Ubuntu 10.04 Unity Edition Ubuntu 10.04 Gnome Edition Ubuntu 10.04 KDE Edition Ubuntu 10.04 XFCE Edition Ubuntu 10.04 LXDE Edition Ubuntu 10.04 Education Edition Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition so, the name of Ubuntu will be more unified and more simple for all versions of Ubuntu. What do you think?

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• What time planning tools do you use?

  - by sbrattla

  I'm trying to get a better overview of my tasks, and I'm looking for a tool which would let me enter tasks (everything from 2 hour tasks to 2 week tasks) and then simply let me organize these tasks on a timeline. I'm thinking that all tasks would have an estimated duration, and I could then prioritize these tasks by moving them along the timeline to prioritize them. The timeline would then show me the "tasks stack" and how far into the future i'm occupied. I'm not looking for an issue/bug handling system, but simply a tool which lets me get an overview of my tasks. I guess we're more into the category of resource planning. What tools do you use for this?

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• What are the alternatives to fixed-price or time-and-materials contracts for software development?

  - by Fortuity

  Where can I learn more about pros/cons of various pricing models for software development? Proponents of agile methodology suggest approaches such as multi-stage contracts, target cost contracts, target schedule contracts, shared benefit contracts, variable scope contracts (http://poppendieck.com/agilecontracts.htm). I'm looking for opinions, experience, case studies or informed discussion of these approaches.

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• What are the alternatives to fixed-price or time-and-materials contracts for software development?

  - by Fortuity

  Where can I learn more about pros/cons of various pricing models for software development? Proponents of agile methodology suggest approaches such as multi-stage contracts, target cost contracts, target schedule contracts, shared benefit contracts, variable scope contracts (http://poppendieck.com/agilecontracts.htm). I'm looking for opinions, experience, case studies or informed discussion of these approaches.

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• Is it a good practice to use smaller data types for variables to save memory?

  - by ThePlan

  When I learned the C++ language for the first time I learned that besides int, float etc, smaller or bigger versions of these data types existed within the language. For example I could call a variable x int x; or short int x; The main difference being that short int takes 2 bytes of memory while int takes 4 bytes, and short int has a lesser value, but we could also call this to make it even smaller: int x; short int x; unsigned short int x; which is even more restrictive. My question here is if it's a good practice to use separate data types according to what values your variable take within the program. Is it a good idea to always declare variables according to these data types?

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• Earning extra cash as a programmer

  - by Anon

  I work as fulltime programmer and have a pretty well paid job for the country where I live, but I could do with a bit of extra cash at the moment (wife nagging about new kitchen etc.). I'd be interested in taking on small projects in my spare time. I'm not interested in writing malware or get rich quick schemes. I've checked out a few sites programmer freelance sites, but the projects all see to be very poorly paid or people that want malware creating (or both). Are there any good freelancing sites that I may have missed? Are there any other ways to find small freelance projects?

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• How is determined an impact of a requirement change on the existing code?

  - by MainMa

  Hi, How companies working on large projects evaluate an impact of a single modification on an existing code? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finished". A new requirement adds a new state, between 2nd and 3rd one. It means that: A constraint on the values 1 - 5 in the database must be changed, Business layer and code contracts must be changed to add a new state, Data access layer must be changed to take in account that, for example the state StateReady is now 6 instead of 5, etc. The application must implement a new state visually, add new controls for it, new localized strings for tool-tips, etc. When an application is written recently by one developer, it's more or less easy to predict every change to do. On the other hand, when an application was written for years by many people, no single person can anticipate every change immediately, without any investigation. So since this situation (such changes in requirements) is very frequent, I imagine there are already some clever techniques and ways to predict the impact. Is there any? Do you know any books which deal about this subject? Note: my question is not related to How do you deal with changing requirements? question. In fact, I'm not interested in evaluating the cost of a change, but rather the way to predict the parts of an application which will be concerned by the change. What will be those changes and how difficult they are really doesn't matter in my question.

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• I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

  - by kmote

  I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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• What software development model has worked best for software teams with heavy dependancy on hardware teams?

  - by MasterDIB

  So, let me explain more. There are a number of competing best practices for software development. I can find that many teams have benefited from Agile practices in some cases. In some other cases, using the Unified Process has been championed by large companies like IBM. The common themes that I find seemed to work well for teams that mainly develop software. I am interested to know what has worked best for people who have worked in shops where there is a team on the other side that produce the hardware that your software is running on. For example, one team puts together a crate with several custom hardware on it; while you need to develop the software that would run on those crates. I can't find a development model (agile, spiral ...) that works best in this case. Any wisdom is this area will be well appreciated.

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• New Job Over Budget

  - by moneylotion

  I recently started a new job as a contract developer, and my non-developer boss of about two weeks ago gave me the task to re-create an app from another language and developer that he will reuse with multiple clients (replacing the front-end), that I estimated would take longer than his estimate of 12 hours. Two weeks later, I'm 230% over-budget. I admit this was my 2nd web app, I had been a wordpress developer in the past, so I am somewhat new to code igniter, but not shabby php by any means. My boss hired me knowing this and I was clear that it would take longer than his 12 hours. He's seen me in the office on task for 2 weeks, he should be somewhat prepared for this bill. Do I expect the full amount of hours, or do I filter against how much of learned? Can I bill for research as a developer?

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• “Can You See Me Think?”

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction This post is the fifty-seventh part of a ramble-rant about the software business. The current posts in this series can be found on the series landing page . A Story… Once upon a time I was a manufacturing systems integrator. That’s a fancy description of a person who designs and builds machine control systems. I was asked to replace a control system and given a tight timeline to accomplish the work. My engineering spidey-senses were tingling, but there were bills to pay and the promise...(read more)

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• Feature Driven Development in the work place?

  - by FXquincy

  Question Please explain Feature Driven Development in a nutshell? Situation My Business Analyst calls their documentation FDD, but it just seems overwhelmed by details. In a Nutshell An 'in a nutshell' example would be good, since I'm trying to reduce unnecessary detail and confusion. I want to add clarity, and an Occam's' razor approach to the documentation. Thanks for your help, Here's what I found

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• Long term planning and agile?

  - by Ignite

  My team has recently went through the process of laying out a nearly one year plan for our direction of work. We have separated the plan into three phases and each phase will include a couple of launches. I wonder, from an agile point of you, is what we do wrong? I think it's not a bad idea, because we haven't spent too much time on designing anything but the first few steps and it's possible for us to change direction. At the same time it's nice that we don't act with only the near term in sight.

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