http://www.thekua.com/atwork Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:36:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I remember looking at a few codebases in C# and it surprised me how many people encapsulate some of their system well, yet treat their application configuration as a different thing. Many times I've seen code that looks like: ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["DatabaseConnectionString"]; alongside the thing that is using it. In fact, ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/22/treat-your-appconfig-like-a-global-variable/ I remember stepping into a heated discussion with two developers who just couldn't agree whether or not they should be writing their code defensively. One of them argued they should always be checking for null, checking for illegal input and throw appropriate exceptions before doing anything with it. The other ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/20/defensive-programming-depends-on-context/ I remember reading about the Cause, Made Visible and Not Related story on Esther Derby's blog a while back. My biggest takeaway was that retrospectives aren't normally the Cause of issues, instead creating Visibility into the issues already present. People constantly surprise me when they say that don't like retrospectives ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/19/retrospectives-making-issues-more-visible/ Maven only has 20 FAQs on its page here. I've been working with it on a project recently, and frankly I had plenty more than 20 to ask. Here's my list of a few things that I hope will help people when they're searching for answers not described well in ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/18/maven-faq/ Excel 2007 is quite a horrible experience. Someone recently told me a story where apparently, Micro$oft said that it's easier for new users to learn, yet would take three weeks of re-training for existing office users. Shame I fall into the latter crowd and not the former. Read on if ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/16/office-2007-woes-insert-new-worksheet/ What's wrong with this: "Cannot execute mojo: resources. It requires a project with an existing pom.xml, but the build is not using one." How about? What are you talking mojo to me for? What is going wrong and how do I fix it? Perhaps something like this would be a better ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/08/12/unhelpful-error-messages-in-maven/ My last post triggered a few comments, with having a common goal for a team to rally around somehow also implied groupthink, and thus, Wisdom of the Crowds is a better alternative. I want to clarify a few things: The point of the original post? Organisations where I've seen them have successful ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/07/31/what-do-you-have-more-of-part-2/ When I go into different organisations, I see many of the people doing the work (analysis, development and testing) split across multiple projects. In my experience there are plenty of reasons why this is just a bad idea, and probably the biggest one that I see is that the split ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/07/29/what-do-you-have-more-of/ I've previously written an article for InfoQ about how agile coaches act when working with teams. For this particular entry, I want to investigate what jobs or roles you might consider trying to either focus on part-time or try full-time to develop the habits and skills necessary to be an ... http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/07/25/the-agile-coach-role/ George Ambler's blog entry titled, "Agility Means Simple Things Done Well, Not Complex Things Done Fast". http://www.thekua.com/atwork/2008/07/25/spot-on/