Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I've seen a place like that (Score 1) 232

by Gazzonyx (#47925291) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?

[...] They once had a brilliant young developer who wrote more in three months than their team did in years, before being sacked for delivering code with a bug that caused an outage. [...]

Please tell me this is an exaggeration. Show me a single developer who hasn't caused an issue of some sorts, in production, and I'll show you a developer that hasn't fully matured yet.

Comment Re:Fear of changing code.... (Score 1) 232

by Gazzonyx (#47925239) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?

[2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.

What ends up happening in that case is that a bug is found in the "original" (or any subset thereof) code and it's fixed. 11 copies with the bug, authored by three other developers, remain.

Comment Why Do You Accept This? (Score 3, Interesting) 232

by Gazzonyx (#47925223) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?
It's ironic, I was literally just reading that blog post.

I've worked in both environments. Where I currently work we have a daily Scrum (in name only) and we only cover three questions:

  • What did you work on yesterday?
  • What do you plan on working on today?
  • Is there anything blocking you yesterday or today?

It's a liberating thing. I can literally call someone else out for blocking me, or they can call me out for blocking them. Our manager can say, "I understand you were working on X, Y, or Z yesterday, but Alice, Bob or Carl needs you to work on this today so they can get their stuff done." It's simple, it's effective and it makes the team more coherent and cohesive with nothing more than a 15 minute "stand-up" (we all work remotely on any given day and we do the Scrum via Google Hangouts) at 10 AM. It sets the tone for the day. And it only costs our attention for 15 minutes and willingness to be reasonable with other professionals on our team.

We don't have:

  • Organizational Fear: You can dial up anyone or schedule a meeting to resolve a problem. If you break the build and no one says anything about it... they can either tell you about it the next daily Scrum, or it isn't a problem for them. Simple as that. You need to talk to someone? Schedule a meeting with them and anyone else that needs to be involved. If you can't make that happen, bring it up at the next daily Scrum.
  • Losing Your Job Fear: We're all paid professionals and are experienced and knowledgeable in our field. Keeping us afraid would only be enough to keep us working, but not enough to keep us innovating and a leader in our field. For more on this, read further.
  • Fear Of Changing Code: Once again, if you have an issue with code, bring it up with the original author of the code or someone familiar with the code base. They won't take it personal (see previous point). If you're afraid of breaking the build, dial up someone and do some pair programming. At worst, you'll check in something that doesn't pass unit tests (or lacking those, code that will not pass code review before it's deployed). You'll feel stupid for at most a full day and you'll survive.

To be honest, FDD seems like a culture problem more than anything else. You're a professional. Act like it and expect those around, and above, you to act like it. If your culture is so messed up that you suffer from these problems, it's most likely just the tip of the iceberg of the organizational challenges that your company faces.

"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller

Submission + - Corporate FOSS Users seek to tell developers what to do.

Submitted by jralls
jralls writes: OK, maybe the headline is a tiny bit inflammatory. The New York Times broke a story today (paywalled if you look at more than 10 stories a month) about ToDo, "an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS, "including ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively". The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.

Submission + - Zappos proactively resets account passwords for users

Submitted by grahamsaa
grahamsaa writes: I received an e-mail tonight stating that my Zappos password had been reset. Since I rarely use the site and don't store credit card information there, I used a throwaway password for that account. Apparently my throwaway password made it onto the the list of passwords, so Zappos proactively changed it.

Have any other sites done this to you recently? What's your stance on using an easy to remember 'throwaway' password on sites that don't have any of your sensitive data?

Submission + - 'Solid light' could compute previously unsolvable problems (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter. The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. “It’s something that we have never seen before,” said Andrew Houck, one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”

Submission + - Universal Big Bang lithium deficit confirmed

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New data from a globular cluster in nearby dwarf galaxy has confirmed that the deficit of lithium that astronomers have found in the Milky Way also exists in other galaxies.

According to the Big Bang theory, the amount of lithium in the universe should be two or three times more than it is. This result shows that the deficit exists outside the Milky Way, which suggests strongly that something significant is wrong with the Big Bang theory.

Submission + - Laid off from job, man builds tweeting toilet (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: With parts from an electric motor, a few household items, an open-source hardware board running Linux, and some coding, Thomas Ruecker, built a connected toilet that Tweets with each flush. The first reaction to the Twitter feed at @iotoilets may be a chuckle. But the idea behind this and what it illustrates is serious. It tracks water usage, offers a warning about the future of privacy in the Internet of Things, and may say something about the modern job hunt. Ruecker built his device on a recent long weekend after he was laid off as an open source evangelist at a technology firm undergoing "rightsizing," as he put it. He lives in Finland.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Rant: Untrusted Data from the Source 4

Journal by Chacham

While trying to load test data, we found duplicates (based on the unique key) in the provided file. So, the BA (English is not her first language) asked them:

Does the test file present valid business scenarios?

The response

Submission + - Linus Torvalds Want to Dominate the Desktop (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Linux is everywhere or is it? At the LinuxCon conference in Chicago today Linus Torvalds was asked where Linux should go next. Torvalds didn't hesitate with his reply.

"I still want the desktop," Torvalds said as the audience erupted into boisterous applause.

Torvalds doesn't see the desktop as being a kernel problem at this point either, but rather one about infrastructure. While not ready to declare a 'Year of the Linux Desktop' he does expect that to happen — one day.

Submission + - Involuntary Eye Movement May Provide Definitive Diagnosis of ADHD (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: If a child who's simply very active is mistakenly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), they can end up on pharmaceuticals such as Ritalin unnecessarily. The problem is, it can be quite difficult to determine if someone actually has ADHD, and misdiagnoses are common. Now, however, researchers from Tel Aviv University have announced that analyzing a patient's eye movements may be the key.

Submission + - Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy cast doubt on the Big Bang?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Back in the 1960s, after the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang reigned supreme as the only game in town. But back then, we also assumed that what we consider as "normal matter" — i.e., protons, neutrons and electrons — was, along with photons and neutrinos, the only stuff that made up the Universe. But the last 50 years have shown us that dark matter and dark energy actually make up 95% of the energy composition of our cosmos. Given that, is there any wiggle room to possibly invalidate the Big Bang?

Submission + - FCC Mandates Text-to-911 From All US Wireless Carriers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to require all U.S. wireless carriers and popular messaging applications to support texting to emergency response units via 911. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile implemented this capability back in 2012; the FCC's vote will make it mandatory for all carriers that operate in the country as well as all messaging applications that interconnect with the SMS structure in the U.S. to follow suit. One technological hurdle this mandate faces is the difficulty of tracing "the exact physical origin of a text message, particularly in residences with multiple floors."

Submission + - Has radar technology caught up with steath technology? (usni.org)

Submitted by AbrasiveCat
AbrasiveCat writes: In the continuing game of cat and mouse between offensive and defensive technologies of war, the technology of radar stealth may have been matched by new multiple frequency radar systems. U.S Naval Institute News (http://news.usni.org/2014/07/29/chinese-russian-radars-track-see-u-s-stealth) reports the Chinese and Russians maybe developing such systems. The present radar systems use high frequency waves for accurately locating an incoming target. Stealth aircraft are designed to adsorb or reflect these wave away from the receiver. It turns out longer wave radars can see the stealth aircraft. The longer wave radar lacks the precision of the high frequency radar, but when the two are combined, as the Russians, Chinese (and US) are doing, you can produce accurate targeting radar. The F117 may have been in a golden age for stealth technology, it will be interesting to see if the F35 arrives to late to be effective against other countries with advanced radar systems.

Slashdot Top Deals

"You shouldn't make my toaster angry." -- Household security explained in "Johnny Quest"

Close