Software Engineering

Non-Technical People Belong on Technical Calls. They Just Shouldn’t Ruin Them.

The reflex when a business stakeholder derails a technical working session is to stop inviting them. That is almost always the wrong fix. What technical meetings need is rules of engagement, not walls around engineering.

Test First, Discover Second, Build Third: A Practical Strategy for Brownfield and Legacy Software Engineering

For non-trivial changes to legacy systems, define the business outcome first, then how you will prove the change works, before you estimate or build it. Outcome, evaluation, bounded discovery, incremental implementation, in that order.

Why Doesn’t Engineering Already Know This?

A guide for executives who think every technical problem should already be obvious to the engineering team. Simple after discovery is not the same thing as obvious before discovery, and confusing the two produces terrible management decisions.

Capability Is Cheap Now. Advantage Is Not.

AI made building things dramatically cheaper, which quietly destroyed a lot of differentiation that was never real. How to tell commodity execution from differentiated execution, and where to spend the judgment you have left.

[Balsamiq Mockups is a good tool for requirement elicitation](http://shahidshah.com/blog/architure-engineering/2009/07/27/balsamiq-mockups-is-a-good-tool-for-requirement-elicitation/)

Comparing SDO and EJB 3

Mike Keith posted recently Compared SDO and EJB 3.

Calculating reliability in software

My friend Andy Glover (finally!) started his blog and he’s got a great first article on software reliability. He’s already a published author and writes for online magazines but as an expert in software quality it’s great to…

Waterfall 2006

I nearly busted a gut reading about the Waterfall 2006 conference that my friend Suvajit emailed me this morning. If you’ve been doing large-scale software development for more than 5 minutes you’ll be rolling with laughter too.

Oracle offers its JSF UI components to Apache

Oracle ADF JSF Components is now open source. If you’ve been looking for a reason to go to JSF, this may be the reason to do it. They have a long list of rich UI components available in their library.

Free icons for developers

famfamfam.com offers some great, free, icons in friendly web image formats. Great Christmas present for yoursefl if you’re a developer.

D.C./Baltimore lead nation in tech postings on job Web site

Anyone looking for a job? Come on over to my neck of the woods: D.C./Baltimore lead nation in tech postings on job Web site

What puts the 2 in Web 2.0?

Check out this slick document that the guys at ActivePath put together on Web 2.0: What_puts_the_2_in_Web_20.pdf (application/pdf Object).

WikiMatrix / Wiki Feature Comparison

A wiki is a great way to do project communication and engineering collaboration but sometimes it’s hard to know which one to pick. The WikiMatrix can help you decide.

FreePatentsOnLine.com

I think the domain name says it all! One feature I like is their RSS feed that shows new patent filings and awards. If you follow new patents like I do, it’s a nice service.

Portal-enabling non-portlet web apps

I’ve been involved in number of portal projects this year and one of the problems that all my customers complain about is the inability to integrate non-portlet based webapps into their portals. I just ran across this open…

IntelliJ IDEA vs. Eclipse

I’m not sure i completely concur with Tim’s post on the basic difference between IDEA and Eclipse but as a huge fan of IntelliJ’s IDE I found that it did have some truth to it. Tim says:

Problems with HTML and CSS

I have been using HTML and CSS for years and since most browsers are starting to support CSS fairly well I’ve been dropping HTML formatting in favor of CSS formatting. However, there are problems that creep up and I’ve found…

Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer’s Fonts

Stop hunting for the right fonts for your IDE: go right to this article.

Offshoring: a challenge or opportunity?

Although we all have mixed feelings about offshoring of our technology jobs, most of the data that’s available is generally anecdotal. I just ran across this report from the British Computer Society (BCS) about offshoring of…

A network music player that doesn’t look like a box

I’ve been searching for a nice music player that would connect to my existing tunes on my PC and play them wirelessly. I’ve seen many offered but they all look like computer devices and the room I want to put the player in…

Put a slick calendar on your desktop

I just discovered a neat little free utility called Rainlendar that can read my Microsoft Outlook calendar and put a {{popup rainlendar.gif rainlendar 377×174}}slick transparent window on my desktop that shows my schedule.…