lifecycle models

Pete TerMaat shares some valuable lessons learned from a summer with "hacking legend" Richard Stallman. He learned that attitude, passion for one's work, was most important. Reviews, coding standards, porting guidelines, bug hunting advice, and other measures can fall flat without a passion for clean code, for "getting things right."

Do you have a bug database or defect tracking system? Whether you call them PRs, CRs, SPRs, or some other acronym, logging your software problems into a database rates as one of the simplest yet most effective things you can do to improve product quality. Sometimes these databases turn into the electronic equivalent of a “roach motel” trap--the bugs go in but they don’t come out!