Merge Early, Merge Often
Integrating changes in branched development
You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance
Long considered an afterthought, software maintenance is easiest and most effective when built into a system from the ground up.
by Paul Stachour, David Collier-Brown | October 23, 2009
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 52 Issue 11—
Making Sense of Revision-control Systems
Whether distributed or centralized, all revision-control systems come with complicated sets of tradeoffs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?
by Bryan O'Sullivan | August 21, 2009
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 52 Issue 9—
Code Spelunking Redux
It has been five years since I first wrote about code spelunking, and though systems continue to grow in size and scope, the tools we use to understand those systems are not growing at the same rate. In fact, I believe we are steadily losing ground. So why should we go over the same ground again? Is this subject important enough to warrant two articles in five years? I believe it is.
by George V. Neville-Neil | January 8, 2009
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 51 Issue 10—
The Yin and Yang of Software Development
The C/C++ Solution Manager at Parasoft explains how infrastructure elements allow development teams to increase productivity without restricting creativity.
Managing Collaboration
Jeff Johnstone of TechExcel explains why there is a need for a new approach to application lifecycle management that better reflects the business requirements and challenges facing development teams.
API Design Matters
Why changing APIs might become a criminal offense. After more than 25 years as a software engineer, I still find myself underestimating the time it will take to complete a particular programming task. Sometimes, the resulting schedule slip is caused by my own shortcomings: as I dig into a problem, I simply discover that it is a lot harder than I initially thought, so the problem takes longer to solvesuch is life as a programmer. Just as often I know exactly what I want to achieve and how to achieve it, but it still takes far longer than anticipated. When that happens, it is usually because I am struggling with an API that seems to do its level best to throw rocks in my path and make my life difficult.
by Michi Henning | June 7, 2007
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 52 Issue 5—
Breaking the Major Release Habit
Can agile development make your team more productive? Keeping up with the rapid pace of change can be a daunting task. Just as you finally get your software working with a new technology to meet yesterday's requirements, a newer technology is introduced or a new business trend comes along to upset the apple cart.
The Heart of Eclipse
A look inside and extensible plug-in architecture ECLIPSE is both an open, extensible development environment for building software and an open, extensible application framework upon which software can be built. Considered the most popular Java IDE, it provides a common UI model for working with tools and promotes rapid development of modular features based on a plug-in component model. The Eclipse Foundation designed the platform to run natively on multiple operating systems, including Macintosh, Windows, and Linux, providing robust integration with each and providing rich clients that support the GUI interactions everyone is familiar with: drag and drop, cut and paste (clipboard), navigation, and customization.
The Long Road to 64 Bits
Double, double, toil and trouble--Shakespeare, Macbeth Shakespeare's words (Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1) often cover circumstances beyond his wildest dreams. Toil and trouble accompany major computing transitions, even when people plan ahead. To calibrate "tomorrow's legacy today," we should study "tomorrow's legacy yesterday." Much of tomorrow's software will still be driven by decades-old decisions. Past decisions have unanticipated side effects that last decades and can be difficult to undo.
Coding for the Code
Despite the considerable effort invested by industry and academia in modeling standards such as UML (Unified Modeling Language), software modeling has long played a subordinate role in commercial software development. Although modeling is generally perceived as state of the art and thus as something that ought to be done, its appreciation seems to pale along with the progression from the early, more conceptual phases of a software project to those where the actual handcrafting is done.
Death by UML Fever
A potentially deadly illness, clinically referred to as UML (Unified Modeling Language) fever, is plaguing many software-engineering efforts today. This fever has many different strains that vary in levels of lethality and contagion. A number of these strains are symptomatically related, however. Rigorous laboratory analysis has revealed that each is unique in origin and makeup. A particularly insidious characteristic of UML fever, common to most of its assorted strains, is the difficulty individuals and organizations have in self-diagnosing the affliction.
Black Box Debugging
Modern software development practices build applications as a collection of collaborating components. Unlike older practices that linked compiled components into a single monolithic application, modern executables are made up of any number of executable components that exist as separate binary files.
Reading, Writing, and Code
Forty years ago, when computer programming was an individual experience, the need for easily readable code wasn’t on any priority list. Today, however, programming usually is a team-based activity, and writing code that others can easily decipher has become a necessity. Creating and developing readable code is not as easy as it sounds.
The Big Bang Theory of IDEs
Remember the halcyon days when development required only a text editor, a compiler, and some sort of debugger (in cases where the odd printf() or two alone didn’t serve)? During the early days of computing, these were independent tools used iteratively in development’s golden circle. Somewhere along the way we realized that a closer integration of these tools could expedite the development process. Thus was born the integrated development environment (IDE), a framework and user environment for software development that’s actually a toolkit of instruments essential to software creation. At first, IDEs simply connected the big three (editor, compiler, and debugger), but nowadays most go well beyond those minimum requirements.
Another Day, Another Bug
As part of this issue on programmer tools, we at Queue decided to conduct an informal Web poll on the topic of debugging. We asked you to tell us about the tools that you use and how you use them. We also collected stories about those hard-to-track-down bugs that sometimes make us think of taking up another profession.
No Source Code? No Problem!
Typical software development involves one of two processes: the creation of new software to fit particular requirements or the modification (maintenance) of old software to fix problems or fit new requirements. These transformations happen at the source-code level. But what if the problem is not the maintenance of old software but the need to create a functional duplicate of the original? And what if the source code is no longer available?
Code Spelunking:Exploring Cavernous Code Bases
Try to remember your first day at your first software job. Do you recall what you were asked to do, after the human resources people were done with you? Were you asked to write a piece of fresh code? Probably not. It is far more likely that you were asked to fix a bug, or several, and to try to understand a large, poorly documented collection of source code.
Coding Smart: People vs. Tools
Cool tools are seductive. When we think about software productivity, tools naturally come to mind. When we see pretty new tools, we tend to believe that their amazing features will help us get our work done much faster. Because every software engineer uses software productivity tools daily, and all team managers have to decide which tools their members will use, the latest and greatest look appealing.
Debugging in an Asynchronous World
Pagers, cellular phones, smart appliances, and Web services—these products and services are almost omnipresent in our world, and are stimulating the creation of a new breed of software: applications that must deal with inputs from a variety of sources, provide real-time responses, deliver strong security—and do all this while providing a positive user experience. In response, a new style of application programming is taking hold, one that is based on multiple threads of control and the asynchronous exchange of data, and results in fundamentally more complex applications.
