November 2006 Entries

I had an interesting conversation with some friends last night and it got me thinking more about the roles that testers play in the software development process.  Thankfully I've worked with a number of testers through my career (although I could do with a few more now) and they've all approached the task differently.  Regardless of their methods and effectiveness, all have had to create and monitor defects.  Once that defect had been created and logged (you are using a defect/bug tracking system aren't you?) testers, developers and managers all begin to position and promote defects based on their position's...

One of the great additions in Visual Studio 2005 are SmartTags.  These are the little drop down menus that appear in the IDE when you're writing code.  The one I use the most is 'Add Using' functionality.  What I don't like about SmartTags is the default key stroke (Ctrl+Alt+F10) that ships with Visual Studio 2005.  Who can feel comfortable with this monstrosity of finger yoga?  The first thing that I do when I start working with a fresh IDE is to remap the View.SmartTagShow View.ShowSmartTag item to Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow.  I find that it is more intuitive (you are, after all, trying to...

Athletes do it.  Musicians do it.  Artists do it.  How may developers do it?  The skills that we use everyday don't just magically appear.  Lots of developers learn and hone these skills by working on real world projects.  Is this right?  I don't think so.  Companies pay good money to hire us with the expectation that we know what we're doing in some area.  They don't pay us all this dough so that we can show up and try out some cool new thing on their unsuspecting clients. Practicing development isn't easy.  You have to come up with problems to...

I haven't been posting a whole lot lately and I figured I should write out the reasons why.  Not so much because I think you guys give two shits (you might, who knows), but more because I wanted to see this in writing in the hopes that it will trigger something in me.  I've warned you now.  Move to the next post in your aggregator, I'm sure it's better than this drivel. I started this most recent gig around a month and a half ago.  Since then I've rode the project startup roller coaster around and around.  When I first started I...

The place I'm working right now doesn't allow me to install software, no matter what it is, onto my development desktop.  I can understand their concerns with licensing, viruses and the such, but I'm struggling without a full toolkit.  Developers need tools, and there are times when we don't see the need for them until we're right in the middle of trying to track down some odd behaviour in our applications.  We also need tools so we can stay productive.  I don't mind the fact that you're willing to pay me a bunch of money to come in and write...