I wholeheartedly agree with the YAGNI principle, but you still want to plan for success. If an application needs a complete rewrite when it suddenly has more than ten users, then it’s YAGNI taken too far. Some things You Are Gonna Need. From my perspective, the two most important points: Don’t shoot yourself in the … Read more
This is a situation that everyone has to deal with on a regular basis simply due to the nature of work. (Typically, if you know everything you need to know to complete a job, you’ve already completed the job and don’t need to do it again. 🙂 ) Be honest with your boss about your … Read more
Keeping testers busy tends to get easier as a project matures (there is more to test!), but the following points apply in the early stages too: Testers can prepare their test plans, test cases, and automated tests for the user stories before (or while) they are implemented. This helps the team discover any inconsistency or … Read more
Version numbering policies can be a bit crazy at times (see Version numbers and JSR277, or Oracle, with its Oracle Database 11g Release 2: 11.2.0.1.0. See also Software Versioning is Ridiculous). But you can start by looking at the Eclipse Version Number policy as a good start. If you really think you need more than … Read more
Lots of Trac plugins look promising. Unfortunately only a handful really delivers and even then some of them are not properly supported or maintained. They also tend to conflict sometimes. I will not recommend anything for project management specifically but these are the ones which made our live so much easier: TagsPlugin – the most … Read more
Deadlines are part of a fundamentally wrong idea about how to do software development. People new to, or outside of, the software development industry do not understand this: Software is done when it is done, no sooner and no later. If a developer has a task and a week to do it, and it looks … Read more
git pull (or rather, the git merge part that pull does) will “solve” both ‘ahead’ and ‘behind’. branch is X commits behind means that there are X new (unmerged) commits on the branch which is being tracked by your current branch. branch is X commits ahead analogously means that your branch has X new commits, … Read more
I work in government. We recently ran a software development procurement process and selected three vendors to work on an Agile project. Some notes: We were already 75% sure we wanted to run an Agile project because we knew our requirements were ambiguous and because it was a public-facing web project with a significant design … Read more
This is way late, but deleting my .idea folder did the trick. Close IntelliJ cd <project-path> rm -rf .idea
It is still as true today as the day it was written. This is because it is fundamentally about communication between people working on the same project, and none of the advances of the past 30 years have substantially changed that. Of course, we have learned a lot in those 30 years, but all improvements … Read more