The real workplace situation is often (as in my case) that the team just doesn't have a design expert at their disposal for any projects whatsoever. In this situation programmers are often the de-facto "designers". Typically they stink at it at first. The best approach in that context is to do what you can so they will make the better choices, and recognize problems and opportunities to fix them.

You cannot ignore the fact that your developers don't know design, but you can get them informed about what to try to attain, and to think in terms of the user.

I'll second the mention of "The Inmates are Running The Asylum" by Alan Cooper

This is a pleasure to read, and gives succinct and memorable examples of real products with UI's that had obvious mistakes (or rather they should have been obvious). And yet these items, and ones like them get released in products every day. It also explains how the same devices and UI's should have been redesigned. One of his points is that programmers are not typically trained to be experts at user interfaces. As a programmer I can't take offense at that because it's true - I see examples of UI design errors in lot's of software ("Are You Sure "). Really, in school - the treatment of the design of UI was never done in enough depth.

The most important point is that it's full of good to-the-point examples that are memorable. With them, a team can share their views with some common context.. They make some of the design discussions and choices much clearer.

So I wouldn't say it should be your only choice, but it should be one of the first ones to be sure to read.

"terribly easy"? You lost me as soon as you said "...set up a system with these features:".

Exactly when/where/who has any government organization (fed/state/other/student council) been able to implement (or even plan!) as system ...that was "easily" done?

Consider this - New Hampshire has no sales tax and Massachusetts has a 5% sales tax. Is it any wonder that residents of Mass living close to the border will happily travel a few minutes north to save some cash - especially on pricier appliances. But I never heard of Mass trying to go after the (lost) revenue from those consumer purchases (oh except for the auto purchases where the DMV will nail you for the $$).

Now is this really different just because a consumer makes the out-of-state purchase electronically? I don't think so - I think it differs only in that it can be tracked and managed. I certainly don't believe that the effort,costs and damage of trying to collect this money is worth the revenue. And finally, the important points are

• State sales tax in particular is hurtful to the economy of the imposing state.
• Lots of people in government want to build ever-more-complex ways of gouging money from people in the name of "fairness".

That's a bit of an over-simplification! If you do use Ant, Hudson/Jenkins will make use of your Ant build (you'll continue to have an Ant build).
But it's much more than that - It keeps track of the builds done for projects, tracks the resulting jars and wars are used in other projects. You can easily see things like "Who ran the build?", "When?", "What code was changed in such-and-such project?" long after builds were done.
We've been using Hudson (we'll probably soon switch to the Jenkins fork) for our JEE projects for a few years now. It's indispensable. We don't use much more than the essentials in most projects and there's no question that it saves us effort and simplifies managing builds and all the data that go with a build.
We generally have a project set up to retrieve a build from CVS or Subversion. For those of us that want to make passing JUnit tests a requirement for the build it will not only can do that but it can keep track of the success rates.
You should try it out, particularly if your current builds are done using Ant. It's easy to set up, works nicely with CVS or Subversion, and it has a lot of features that take advantage of your existing Ant build setup.

Why do (otherwise) sensible people folks want to teach matters of faith as science? The guy is an educated professional, a dentist. Honestly I wouldn't mind having teaching about religious beliefs in schools, but call it "theology"! call it what it is! And give equal time to Buddha, Mohammad, Allah, and of course some of the lesser known, but rightful Higher Power Beliefs like FSM. Calling these conjectures "science" is deceitful, I can only presume that the real goal is to support religious beliefs in the guise of science. The most sensible thing for me seems to be support of the Pastafarian beliefs, which put this into its rightful perspective.(http://www.venganza.org/) Arrgh. I mean good day. May His Noodliness be with you all.