Topic Ideas
Not that I'm volunteering to write the topic, but I had some topic ideas. Thought other people might want to post things they wanted to hear about.
Here's mine:
- TDD (test driven development). Found this very useful. Even when maintaining. Especially when maintaining. Write tests for the stuff you are about to fix. Next time you'll appreciate them.
- Peer Review. I think you touched on this, but I was thinking it might be good to give some examples of when and how to do this. Very few people do a good job of reviewing other people's work. I really appreciate it when someone does do a good job. Usually it means they tore me a new one. I seem to recall a Mr. Surel tearing me up a few times.
- Hounding QA. Assuming you have a QA department (some of us aren't so lucky), how to get the most out of QA. Like setting up PDBs for all release kits, duplicating QA environments on developer machines, etc.
Sorry that's all I could think of right now. - Rich
I'm thinking the next one will be either Reviews or QA/helpdesk relations. These things come up with me on a daily basis. It's amazing how many developers I know don't take advantage of these folks, assuming they are available to take advantage of - Mike
I'll throw my topics in the ring, too. A briefly documented list first and maybe Mike (JP-prime) can set up some topic driven discussions:
Good versus bad (as in badly written) requirements. How many times have you gotten well into a project only to find the folks in (Sales || Marketing || Customer) really meant something different?
Revision Control - ie, CVS, versus Perforce, versus Subversion. As long as you understand what the tool is for you can go a long way in just about any of them. If you don't know what the tool is for then you're going to screw up any of them.
Build systems - I can't stress enough how important a maintainable and automated build system is for any project. A single Makefile can go a long way in a lot of 2-3 file projects but once you start to do real work you get into complications. My current fav is Mentok (http://mentok.sourceforge.net)
Releasing - there are right ways and wrong ways to let your customers have builds.
Security - "Quit writing bad code" and other topics to avoid getting 0wn3d - Jeremy Bennett
For source control stuff, Eric Sink has an ongong feature here
http://software.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html
Beyond that I know that www.joelonsoftware.com has some pieces that touch on some of the issues brought up by JP-in-Law, but probably not in the depth he's thinking of. - JP Prime - I like that
Mike,
Can you make comment posts threaded? Will be much easier to keep track of what's going on.
And you should see how the QA teams, code reviews, and security reviews are utilized around here!
- Stan
Oh and by the way, our group is looking for good developers and testers. Lots of them.
- Stan