My Life, My Universe, My Everything

Cool. Some might have followed the DARPA Grand Challenge last year. Now it will go into the next round by conquering the urban road, as reported in Robot cars will race in real traffic – tech – 03 October 2006 – New Scientist Tech. I find this interesting as we also work on such topics, e.g. Traffic Sign Recognition.

I’d be very interested in the results of the study mentioned in the following article: Technology News: Developer: Putting Open Source Development Under the Scope

A bit more from the article:

How are open source software projects able to set their speed and quality on the best participants? That’s simple: “No meetings,” Berkus said.

“I’m serious,” he continued. “In a large proprietary software development environment, engineers spend four to nine hours a week in meetings, where they are given assignments by managers and expected to work on only their assigned project for the next week. Areas of responsibility are carved out carefully and elaborate quality control and review processes are enforced. The result of all this is to pace the engineers to the plodding pace of management, so that they can stay in control of the project.”

Another reason open source development moves more quickly is that engineers are on the projects they want to work on, limiting procrastination and “sandbagging,” said Berkus.

Lastly, Berkus explained that open source developers are less apt to work on incorrect or buggy code since the project is their own.

“Open source projects are less likely to follow ‘wrong’ specifications, because the same people who write the code are the ones setting the goals,” he noted.

Learning from mistakes made by others is always a good idea. However, the article also looks a common reasons for coding mistakes. I found particular interesting the section on “Why do developers make mistakes?” where

• Ignorance
• Stress
• Boredom
• Human Frailties

were identified as some reasons.

Dr. Dobb’s | Avoiding the Most Common Software Development Goofs | September 17, 2006

Dr. Dobb’s | Code Inspection Book | September 17, 2006

The book summarizes the results of 2500 reviews of 3.2 million lines of code at Cisco.

“The book refers to a number of studies, some of which are relatively obscure. For instance, did you know that when reading a function developers repeatedly return to look at variable definitions? The implication is that short term memory doesn’t hold a lot, so wise teams will insist that all functions fit on a single page. Then it’s easy to glance up at the declarations without shuffling through paper or screens.”

“But engineers achieved the best results when inspecting at about 300 lines of code per hour or less. And after about an hour review effectiveness plummets. We get tired.”

“Expect to find about 15 defects per hour.”

“Authors who “annotate” and explain the code before the review have fewer mistakes. ”

“Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review,” is free (in US only, otherwise shipping rates apply) to order on-line at SmartBear. It’s a physical volume, not a PDF.

I have managed an agile project and convincing developers to follow coding conventions isn’t easy. Thus, the following article was interesting for me: Dr. Dobb’s | Coding Conventions: Make Them Agile | September 20, 2006

The main conclusion is that the coding conventions should come from the team themselves, should be simple and localized. “… concentrate on creating an agile coding convention that meets the needs of your agile organization.”

Jospeh Weizenbaum is a computing pioneer and known amongst many for his ELIZA project. Now there is a film about him: Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work.

While being in Boston, I attended the open floor session of the SD Best Practice 2006 conference. I will consolidate my findings from there and publish some of it here too. I was impressed by the many talks and tools for Agile Software development methods.

Next week I will be on a course – learning about the standard development method at my company. This is a classical waterfall model. Since I have been using the Agile Method SCRUM in my last project this will be an interesting contrast and surely a source for discussions.

So I’m back from the US. I had a great time in Boston, New York and Washington. Big hugs to my friends who accommodated me over there. Since I am so fortunate, I thought I share my luck with others and offer my place or time for visitors too. Due to a recommendation by Henner, I joined the Hospitality Club as ralpheroo (that nickname I got in the pub when I supported Australia one night of the World Cup).

I have some problems with the pictures I took during the trip as the file system seems to be mixed up a bit. That makes from some interesting pictures but also for some unusable ones. I hope to put some pics up soon.

I just want to let you know that I will travel to the US (East Coast) soon. I will go to Boston to visit Franzi. My plans include to drive to New York City, to Washington and to Philadelphia. In Washington we should meet with Fares, an old friend from Kent.

In October I will come to the UK – attending a wedding of two friends from Vienna, visiting Giri and Inaz in Bristol and give a short company presentation to the CS students at Kent University. I’m already looking forward to that trip too.

That’s it – next week I will be busy with our Project Experience workshop and a departmental trip to Bratislava. I shall be back on-line after the trip to the US.

Today I found the webcalldirect.com service. It allows you to make free calls, so they claim. I decided to try it out – and it worked – for about 5min I could chat with my parents, then we got disconnected. So I called again,… and again… All this without even registering.