To be more accurate, Xbox is...
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My review of The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace has been published at JavaRanch. |
Chris Matts presents a very interesting challenge in his blog entry:
It would be interesting to see if anyone has done some research on the actual versus estimate distributions for normal projects and those developed using test driven development.
Anyone?
Behold the Pragmatic Diet Programmer!
Every now and then, one hears about a team somewhere across the globe using audio, video or other kinds of aids to help them in their software development projects. Usually it's related to either documenting design decisions and how the team came to those decisions (video) or to monitoring the builds your continuous integration server pops out every few minutes (audio).
Andy Hunt, one of the Pragmatic Programmers, has written about listening to complex systems in which the idea of using audio for communicating status information is taken to another level. The fundamental idea is to exploit the medium to its full capacity, i.e. making the sound rich and continuous.
That is definitely an intriguing thought. I wonder how well people would get used to the test coverage being reported by a cricket or an owl? Maybe even too well, considering that less is often more. I am not going to just jump into conclusions and claim that we should rush to buy state-of-the-art sound systems to our offices. I do, however, claim that we're currently not using this medium optimally.
My suggestion would be to wire up your environment to sound an alarm when someone checks in, when the continuous integration fails, and when it's time to go home, and experiment to find out where you can still convey useful information through sound effectively. How does that sound?
It looks like Spring is indeed getting traction in the community. People are playing with it, finding the deficiencies (hopefully improving the framework along the way), and there's a constant stream of Spring books coming out. Nice. I really should look more into Spring but I don't feel like learning yet another XML configuration schema. Regardless, what I've seen from Spring is definitely encouraging.