Agile Software Development

There are many different software development methodologies that are practiced today. One of the popular choices today is Agile Software Development. When I do software development I generally use agile techniques, but I wouldn't consider myself an agile purist. Where I work, we use scrum meetings, and very quick development cycles, and a few other agile ideas. But we don't use every agile technique.

I assume most people and businesses do this, but I try to be familiar with many different methodologies and practices as possible. I try to use the ideas and techniques that best fit the situation at hand. If I'm doing a large scale project, I try to do more work gathering requirements upfront, but if the project is much smaller I may just sit down with the project owner for a quick discussion and start designing and implementing from that.

I know some people are much more religious about this, and the idea of mixing and matching between different methodologies would be heresy, but it really does work. There are times that it is good to be strict and keep with consistent policies and procedures, but there seem to be many more occasions where flexibility is king. Within certain constraints and with a good understanding of software development, it can be very advantageous to be flexible. In days with tight schedules, limited resources, and never ending requirements we must do what we can to thrive and create great software.

Death to Internet Explorer 6

I personally think that Internet Explorer 6 should be outlawed. Web development can be difficult enough to make things look good and work right, that throwing Internet Explorer 6.0 into the mix just makes things that much harder. Even when I'm doing ASP .NET development, you would think that everything would work well with IE 6, but that is not the case.

I spend most of my time using Firefox to test my sites, then do some quick checks in either IE 7 or IE 8, depending on what is installed on the computer, and in most cases things look and work pretty well. Sometimes there may be a few tweaks necessary to get things just right. After that I have to spin up a virtual machine, or find an old computer with IE 6 on it. And that is where the fun begins.

Web page layouts never quite look right, IE 6 never really seems to do what you've told it to. It selectively ignores CSS and re-sizes things how it wants. The internet is abound with IE 6 CSS hacks. Functionality seems to have just as many problems. Basic JavaScript is hit or miss, it might work just fine, or it might decide to be your worst enemy. Anything more complex like AJAX is almost a lost cause. You might as well develop and maintain two separate websites: one for real web browsers and another for IE 6.

Maybe I'm being a little hard on the browser, but it really is a web developers worst nightmare. If there were only a few computers out there that still had IE 6, that would be one thing. But there is still a large portion of computers that run IE 6 as their primary browser. I defintely favor Firefox, but I don't mind if people want to use IE 7 or IE 8, just not IE 6. We should all wish it a fond farewell, and retire the old chap already.

.NET Code Coverage

I've been looking for a good, free code coverage tool for .NET for quite a while. I know that years ago NCover used to be pretty good, but the open source version appears to be dead, replaced by a commercial version. The old version still exists and works, but it's pretty outdated. Recently I've found PartCover but haven't had a chance to thoroughly try it out. Beyond that, I haven't been able able to find anything else that is open source or even free. But neither of these two solutions appear to have lots of active development going on, which I consider a pretty important metric when looking at adopting an open source tool or framework.

It seems surprising that their isn't more activity in the open source world in this area. There seems to be many other active communities in the open source world about C# and .NET. There are many projects like NUnit and NHibernate that are actively developed and extremely helpful. But there doesn't seem to be much open source activity about code coverage. Is this because people find that the commercial options available work well at a reasonable price? Or do people just not put much importance on code coverage?

I think that code coverage receives less attention than many other software development practices like unit testing, but it still seems like it would get more focus that it currently does. I hope that there is a code coverage tool out there that I just can't find, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Next Big Thing

I have to admit that I am constantly trying to think of The Next Big Thing: the next web fad, the next big technology, etc. I'd love to come up with the next Facebook or Google. Software is my passion, and I'm always trying to thing of new ways to use software to help people and/or make money. Most of my ideas never pan out, but it doesn't stop me from thinking of new ones.

I'll admit that it is a little optimistic to think that I'll come up with the Facebook or Google, but it would be so cool if I did. All I need to think of/invent/find out/predict the next big thing on the web. I find that it is easy to come up with ideas, but most of them are slight twists on things that already exist. Trying to come up with something truely unique and something that people want is not so easy.

Of course, part of what drives me is the thought of a potential revenue stream, it would be great to come up with something that generates income. But that is not my only draw. I just enjoy writing software, and if I can make a little extra money doing it, then even better. The last aspect is nerd cred. How cool would it be to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Paige.

Hopefully I'll come up with The Next Big Thing soon, but it's taking a lot of work.

Software Developer Job Interviews

At my job I have the interesting job of interviewing potential software developers. First of all it's much better to be on the interviewer side of the equation, but even then I see some pretty interesting things.

Some candidates that I've seen just seem so far off the mark, that it isn't even funny. I know that software developers have some very strong (and generally accurate) stereotypes about them, but sometimes I just have to laugh. I assume that when people are interviewing, that they put their best face forward. So when I see someone that is severely lacking in communication skills or that can't seem to think through a basic story problem I get concerned.

For hiring software developers, I generally look for two main things. First is technical experience and knowledge. The candidates I hire need to have a respectable 4 year degree in Computer Science and/or years of on the job experience. Of course a lot of this depends on the level of candidate I'm looking for, but there has to be something. Much of this technical background can be gleaned from a resume, unlike the second thing I look for: communication skills.

Like I said before, I know that there are many well deserved stereotypes about software developers, and one of them is lack of communication skills. But even between developers there can be a huge difference in this area. Some people that I have interviewed (and sometimes worked with) can't even communicate well with other techies. They speak in a language that is all their own, that others can barely understand.

If someone passes the smoke test for both of these items after a brief phone interview, then I will generally consider a face-to-face interview. One thing that I like to use during an interview is word problems or Puzzles. These help me to get some insight into how people think, communicate, and even respond to pressure. And it's not all about getting the correct answer, although that helps.

Some other resources that I have found to be useful both as an interviewer and interviewee is Programming Interviews Exposed. It isn't a magic bullet, but it has helped me as an interviewer to get a different view on things. Some of the ideas they present are a little extreme, but still provide some insight.