The Latest
Bulking Up[magazine] How can strengthening people skills, such as teamwork and communication, help shape you into a top-form tester? |
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Code With Character[magazine] Use .NET generics to get to know your data types and form more meaningful, trusting, typesafe relationships with them. |
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Taking Our Act on the Road[magazine] In this Test Connection, Michael Bolton discusses making your products portable. |
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Rebuilding When CPPFLAGS Changes[article] GNU Make has no way of detecting that some targets ought to be rebuilt, because it doesn't take into account changing the commands. If, for example DEBUG=1 causes the flags passed to the compiler to change then the target ought to be rebuilt. This article shows how, in a few lines of GNU Make code, to make that happen. |
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Data Crunching Tips and Techniques[article] Data crunching is probably the least glamorous part of our jobs, but it has to be done. Someone will always need to recycle legacy code, translate files from one vendor's proprietary binary format into XML, check the integrity of configuration files, or search Web logs to see how many people have downloaded the latest release of the product. Knowing how to compile this data with the least amount of effort can be crucial to a project's success or failure. In this week's column, Greg Wilson looks at some of the existing tools and techniques used to crunch data more efficiently and productively. |
Greg Wilson
February 22, 2006 |
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Will Open Source Dominate Development Management?[article] Open Source is a great concept, thmough any resisted at first. Can you remember a time when it was valid to use the argument that, "Nobody will commit to supporting it, so you're taking your chances"? Today, I see it differently. There are loads of support for open source products, even better than for commercial products in many cases. So does that make it the winner? |
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Addressing Concerns Of Performance Of Integration Builds[article] High performance of integration builds is one of the keys to risk-free software development. This article discusses simple and advanced approaches towards addressing concerns of performance of integration builds. |
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The Unchangeable Rules of Software Change[article] The authors examine the fundamental truths about project and requirements changes: What can we control? What is beyond our control? What are some of the common perils and pitfalls of change-control and iterative development? We discuss how to avoid many of these common pitfalls without creating new ones along the way, and provide a wealth of resources for first-timers to iterative development. |
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Finish on Time by Managing Scale[article] When deciding how a user's task is to be supported in our software, we often look at possible design solutions and select one that's best for the product and the user. As the project deadline approaches, however, we might choose to dismiss some features outright. In this column, Jeff Patton suggests we try keeping more features by adjusting their scale. |
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Patterns without Purpose[article] Avoid useless layers: Let each pattern earn its way into your architecture. |
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Dynamic Breakpoints in the GNU Make Debugger[article] The most recent change (taking GMD from v1.0.0 to v1.0.1) is the addition of dynamic target breakpoints. At the GMD prompt it's now possible to set and remove breakpoints on the name of a file (in GNU Make language a target) that the Makefile will build. |
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Open Source, and other Dumb Ideas[article] It was way back when I was in school, walking uphill through the snow both ways, mind. That's when I first encountered Emacs and the Free Software Foundation. Because I was young and naïve and enthusiastic, I jumped in with both feet. Free software was going to revolutionize the world, and I was going to write most of it! I was naïve, like I said. I think most FOSS (free/open-source software) people get started in school, the same as me. A lot of the ideas come from the young and idealistic. Face it: young people have dumb ideas. |
Austin Hastings
January 31, 2006 |
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SCM Design Patterns: Parallel Development and Content Management[article] This author is not a storng proponent of the Parallel Development design pattern. I feel that it has some fundamental flaws that make managing the quality and consistency of your CIs very difficult. The last design pattern, Content Management can be viewed as a less structured forms of SCM. |
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Interface or Interfere?[article] One of the Holy Grails of automated quality toolsets is a fully integrated suite that seamlessly tracks the process all the way from requirements to test cases and on through to defect tracking. This fully integrated suite makes for a great marketing pitch and sexy slideware, but in Linda Hayes' experience its functionality usually stops there. The leap from theory to practice seems to fall short, and it makes her wonder whether the concept of a fully integrated suite is fundamentally flawed or if it's just the implementation that needs attention. In this column, she begins her investigation by studying two test cases to decide whether these experiences are anomalies or the rule. |
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Affordable Peer Reviews[article] Many people know that peer reviews can help them to produce better-quality products, but most organizations do not use this potent tool. Why? Because, although they would like to experience the quality benefits, they can't justify the costs they would incur.
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Alan S. Koch
January 22, 2006 |