Another Day in Mythical Man Month

2007-07-26T15:34:00.000+08:00

Quotes for software engineers

In the recent past I've been trying to compile a collection of quotes related to software engineering.

Why yet another collection of SE-related quotes? Well, none that's out there matched what exactly I wanted (either had too few/many quotes, or contained too many quotes that didn't agree with my views).

The result of my effort can be viewed at this page. If you have something to say about my quotes collection (for example, if you know of a quote I have missed), please use the "add comment" feature of this blog to do so.

Students shun computer science for no good reason?

2006-06-15T21:24:00.000+08:00

I had the opportunity to visit a couple of universities recently, and a recurring topic of conversation was the falling numbers of enrolment in CS programs. Along the same theme, PC magazine reports :

A report released June 7 by the Computer Science Teachers Association Curriculum Improvement Taskforce criticized U.S. high schools for not uniformly requiring students to take computer science classes. ... The report states that the lack of focus in the United States on computer science education is "disastrous and shortsighted," in light of an anticipated shortage of qualified candidates for the 1.5 million computer and IT jobs expected by 2012.

Apparently, "an increasing number of students believe that there are few rewarding or varied high-tech career opportunities, a perception based on media reporting and not marketplace realities".

Hmmm....

Feeling joy without having fun

2006-06-13T12:11:00.000+08:00

[Apologies for the delay in posting ; traveling, and thesis writing kept me busy]

For Kent Beck fans out there, there's an interesting lunchtime talk by him available for download at Agitar site. He talks about feeling comfortable in your own skin, and feeling joy, even when you aren't having fun (at work). A bit philosophical yet good food for thought, particularly if you plan a long term career in software development.

For those who don't know Kent, he's the brain behind eXteme programming, and co-author of JUnit, the world’s most popular software testing framework.

Display the words "Hello, world" at the top left corner of the screen

2006-05-05T20:39:00.000+08:00

Here's an interesting bit of trivia I found in SD Times newsletter:

In what language is the following Hello World program written?

Display the words "Hello, world" at the top left corner of the screen.

The answer is here. Along the same lines, here's a page with 'hello world' in many languages.

Personal Branding for Software Engineers???

2006-04-27T23:14:00.000+08:00

"Personal Branding for Technology Professionals", the free eBook (availabe at Life Beyond Code ) by Rajesh Setty has some interesting things to say. If you can spare a few minutes, have a look - you might like what you see...

Original blog entry that tipped me off about the book

Scott McNealy No Longer Runs the 'Joint'

2006-04-26T08:49:00.000+08:00

Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder, CEO and chairman, yielded the position of chief executive at 5 pm Eastern time yesterday (24th April '06) after the announcement of a third-quarter loss of US$217 million despite a growth in revenues. McNealy will remain chairman of Sun. Jonathan Schwartz has taken over as the company’s CEO, leaving behind his previous position as Sun’s COO. He keeps his title of president.

“Twenty-two years I’ve been running this joint,” said McNealy in a conference call last evening, “and having a good time with it. I’d love to do that much more, but we’ve got a great guy here who I’ve been trying to get into this role for 10 years now.”

Above text quoted from: SDTimes newsletter
Official announcement from Sun
'Scott, you are a hero to us all' - Jonathan Schwartz

Dilbert has the best job in America?

2006-04-14T22:32:00.000+08:00

Generally I try to avoid reblogging, but I coudn't resist this one. Software Engineering has topped the CNNMoney.com Best Jobs in America list!
Full credit to original blog post on this.

Prefactoring: Why I Look Forward to Reading the Book

2006-04-14T20:44:00.000+08:00

Ken Pugh's Jolt award winning book Prefactoring has got off to an unfortunate bad start, judging from a bunch of nasty response it has generated from the blogger community (example 1, 2, 3). It seems most of these are based on an Amazon review, which Ken Pugh says 'not approved by me and was full of marketing hype'. In addition, I also noted that many of these detractors haven't actually read the book!
I haven't read the book either, so I'm not going to take sides here. But I dare say I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the book.

My initial impression: Although prefactoring and refactoring may not be worlds apart, they are NOT the same thing either, and they are NOT competing techniques.

While I fully believe in refactoring mercilessly, I'll also go out on a limb and say that the right mix of prefactoring and refactoring should win the day. Who cares if Ken gave a name (BTW, catchy name) to something any good programmer would do anyway?
On a separate note, I also look forward to any response from the refactoring folks (such as Martin Fowler).

My daily dose of "blogs from the trenches"

2006-04-05T19:42:00.000+08:00

While I'm an avid reader of what I call blogs from the gurus (i.e., blogs by software luminaries who once in a while lay a golden egg of a post), I've also been looking for my daily dose of what I call blogs from the trenches (i.e., blogs of software engineers who 'work in the field'). After monitoring community blogs for a while, I think I've found my fix in the thoughtworks blog. It seems to have a continuous trickle of blog posts (some better than the others of course) - just what I need to keep in touch with the 'stuff' going on in the industry...

Jolt Awards to Continue...

2006-03-31T20:49:00.000+08:00

In response to my post on the possibility of Jolt awards 2006 being the last, fellow blogger lupus said...

"Rosalyn Lum told me the awards are going to continue. She's already planning for next year"

I checked with Rosalyn (Technical Editor, SD Magazine) myself. It's confirmed. Jolt awards will be continued, which is great news indeed. Thanks lupus for your heads up.

Intentional Programming - It's not dead yet...

2006-03-28T00:13:00.000+08:00

I was going through Martin Fowler's article on Language oriented programming, which mentions that Intentional programming is still in the works (operating under the radar, Intentional Software is developing it). Couple of years ago I came across IP in one of the courses I took (my fav, CS6201 Software Reuse) and liked very much what I saw. Generally, I'm curious about anything that promises productivity benefits. IP indeed promises a lot of that. The man behind IP is Charles Simonyi, the same guy who invented the Hungarian notation. After watching the their website for a while, I got the impression that IP is a lost cause. But apparently not. And that's good news indeed. It seems JetBrains (Intellij folks) is also cooking up something similar called MPS, and so is Microsoft (called Software Factories). If you have any interests in Domain Specfic Languages, Generative Programming, or Meta-programming as much as I do, you may also want to stay tuned...

The Beloved Gang Member!

2006-03-22T21:20:00.000+08:00

Today I chanced upon this wiki on John Vlisssides (who passed away on November 24, 2005 after a long-term battle with cancer). In case you didn't know (shame on you!), he was one of the 'Gang of Four' who wrote the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. According to this wiki, what others remember most about John is echoed by the following exact words from Steve Abrams (IBM).

"The essence of John's greatness was not in his technical accomplishments – it was in his humanity"

Being a big pattern fan myself, I've read and re-read the GOF book (recommended reading for any software engineer, IMHO). Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person, I was nevertheless very much saddened by his untimely demise. John, may you rest in peace!

Did Russians Really Use a Pencil to Write During Space Travel?

2006-03-19T17:08:00.000+08:00

The following story may sound familiar at first, but read on - it may not be the version you've heard!

There's a marvelous story of technology and consultants gone wild, developing the Fisher Space Pen. The story goes that the U.S. Government spent millions of dollars of taxpayer's money developing a space pen—a pen that the astronauts could take to the moon that would operate in the harsh conditions of weightlessness, extreme heat and cold. Technology rushes to the rescue, and develops a miracle pen that can write upside down in a boiling toilet.

The Russians, by comparison, decided to use a pencil.

A marvelous tale of an inappropriate solution, except for one small problem. It's not true. Both the Russian and the U.S. astronauts used pencils at first, but there was a danger of the leads breaking and shorting out electric components, and the wood of the pencil itself was combustible as well. In a pure oxygen atmosphere, that's a really bad thing. The Fisher corporation realized this and, at its own cost, designed the Fisher Space Pen, which it then sold to NASA at reasonable cost. After the disastrous Apollo One fire, NASA made the Fisher pens mandatory.

Fisher listened to the real requirement, even before the client knew it. In time, NASA came to realize that they were right. It was an appropriate use of high-technology to solve a very real problem.

If you found the above good reading (I sure did), you may want to check out the article The Art in Computer Programming By Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, at developer.*

Jolt Winners are Out! For the Last Time!!

2006-03-17T22:16:00.000+08:00

SDMagazine has announced The 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Award Winners

Some picks from the Winners:

BOOKS GENERAL Jolt Winner: Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O'Reilly)
TECHNICAL BOOKS Jolt Winner: Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt and Mike Clark (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS Jolt Winner: Visual Studio Team System 2005 (Microsoft)
WEB DEVELOPMENT TOOLS Jolt Winner: Rails 1.0 (rubyonrails.org)
...

A related (sad, but not surprising - according to some!) news is the death of SDMagazine. So this may be the last Jolt awards as we know it. Let's hope not.

How I improve my Software Engineering knowledge, while my wife chooses clothes...!

2006-03-12T17:38:00.000+08:00

Recently (well sometime back, just didn't get around to blog it) I found a great way to productively use the time I'm forced to waste doing other, sometimes rather unpleasant, things (e.g., commuting, jogging, and of course, waiting for my wife to chooses clothes at clothing sales!). It's simple really: just download audio recordings (podcasts, as some call them) of interviews with various software 'guru's and listen to them on an MP3 player (I use the inbuilt MP3 player of my Motorola 680i). If anybody didn't know about this already, following are two great places to start:

Note: Many thanks to my friend and ex-colleague Harsha (at hSenid) for bringing podcasts to my attention

I'd rather go fly a kite...

2006-03-03T17:35:00.000+08:00

Software engineering educator and flight instructor Philip Greenspun PhD(MIT) explains why he loves teaching flying more than software engineering. It's a thought provoking post, and it has received some interesting comments already ...

Feel like "Agitating" your source code? Now you can!

2006-03-01T23:44:00.000+08:00

At a recent exhibition I came across an interesting tool called Agitar that "agitate" Java code in order to flush out bugs. I must say I was intrigued, and so were many others at the exhibition. In fact, I had to wait a long time before I got a chance to talk to the exhibitors. When finally my turn came, Mark McLaughlin, a senior solution consultant of Agitar (yes, the company is also called Agitar) explained to me...

Agitar is much more than a typical unit testing tool such as JUnit. It automatically generates a battery of test cases to agitate the source code (e.g., if methodA takes an int parameter, Agitar creates test cases to feed methodA with different int values), and reports observations it makes about the code by running the test cases (e.g., 'methodA runs fine for positive parameters, but fails for negative values'). Based on those observations developers can detect whether things are the way they should be.
Agitar also has a concept called 'domain experts', i.e., tools that encapulates extra domain-specific rules for creating more domain-specific tests. For example, one can use the 'Struts domain expert' when testing Struts applictions.

Although Agitar is young, it has already won awards, and apparently people are showing interest. Some webinars, self-running demos and white papers are available but unfortunately there is no trial version yet.

There are many testing tools out there, but I feel there's something extra in Agitar. I wish Agitar the best, and I also wish for a trial version (or a free 'light' version for the guys without the big bucks!).

Oh, did I mention that Agitar has managed to get Kent Beck (creator of JUnit) on board as an 'Agitar Fellow'?

Maintaining Future Web Applications: It's Time to Brace Ourselves

2006-02-28T20:32:00.000+08:00

After attending the recent Sun Tech Days event, I was duly impressed by the latest techniques/tools Web Engineers have at their disposal. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a bit uneasy, seeing how rapid development of Web apps is receiving the lion’s share of attention, maintainability of Web apps hardly receiving a thought. Some of my observations along this line of thoghts:

The rush towards visual programming:

The Good: While visual (code-less, drag and drop) programming is nothing new, I'm still impressed by how fast Web programming is attaining visual programming capabilities; even coming close to fully-fledged RAD technologies such as VB. UI frameworks such as JSF is a major step in this direction, ably supported by tools such as Java Studio Creator. Visual programming indeed helps a lot when it comes to building Web applications rapidly.
The Not-so-good: Visual programming does very little to improve the maintainability of the application being built. For example, the ease of drag-and-drop coding deters the application of better reuse techniques; techniques although more-difficult-to-apply, could result in more maintainable code. Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before we have to face in Web apps the same maintenance problems we had in legacy VB applications (perhaps even worse, due to additional complications of the Web).

Overuse of frameworks:

The Good: It has become common practice to use of frameworks such as Struts, Hybernate, and Spring as the foundations on which enterprise scale Web applications are built.
The Bad: A negative side effect of these frameworks is that they tend to fragment code, particularly into various configuration files. Historically, Web apps have been hard to test, but this fragmentation makes it even less testable. Needless to say a less-testable system is a less-maintainable one.

Overdoing that 'AJAX ' thing:

The Good: No doubt AJAX is a cool technology and it’s going to hang around for a while. It’s a significant step towards making Web applications behave more like traditional desktop applications.
The Bad: However, AJAX code is complex and hard to work with (to debug for example), unless you have a lot of tool support. Again this is bad news for maintainers of Web applications.

Many thanks to Chris Loosley for saying some nice things about this post...

Attack of the (Software) Clones !!!

2006-02-27T21:05:00.000+08:00

We software engineers often copy-paste-modify (i.e., clone) code as a quick reuse mechanism. Sometimes we have to clone whole systems, or subsystesm. Well, the problem is that we have to maintain all these clones in a consistant manner; failing to do so results in inconsistancies (i.e., update anomalies). One symptom of such update anomalies is bugs that were supposed to be fixed cropping up again and again (sounds familiar?).
If you face this problem of clones, I urge you to have a look at the free and open source technology of XVCL, being developed in our lab. It has been successfully used for managing product lines (sets of similar products) in the industry. We are looking for more industry collaborators from both academia and industry ...

Sun Tech Days 2006 (Singapore)

2006-02-27T20:24:00.000+08:00

I had the chance to attend "Sun Tech Days 2006" at Raffles City, Singapore 22-23 Feb. I was impressed by how well the event was organized. Both days were packed with presentations having enough technical contents mixed with interesting tool/tech demos (Not to mention great catering, and generous free goodies).
The event was a great way to catch up with the latest Java Technologies in a very short time, and less effort. And it was free for students! I look forward to the next one. Kudos to Sun Microsystems.
NetBeans is getting better! Long ago I switched from NetBeans to other IDEs (IDEA, and then to Eclipse) but new version of NetBeans seems to have some cool features (integrated profiling for example) . I'm definitely going to give it a test drive. I hope they unify the NetBeans Product Line (Studio Creator, Studio Enterprise, etc.) into one IDE.
AJAX is hot, so is JSF! There was a lot of emphasis on AJAX and JSF (and some cool demos to go with it).
Oracle and SAP were also present to show how their applications support J2EE (now called JEE).

Floating Down the Waterfall

2006-02-27T20:01:00.000+08:00

"After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance"

When I saw this bold statement in http://www.waterfall2006.com/ my first thought was 'What the ...." Skimming through the contents had me in a sweat. Number of people I've come to admire for their agile approaches to software development (such as Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Robert C. Martin, to name a few) seems to be denouncing all the values they have been promoting, and I have come to value. Then I saw this!
Super Model Driven Architecture: An Update From the OMG by Tyra Banks

Sigh of relief. All's well. It's just a parody. A smart one though. Hats off to the perpetrators.

Mythical What?

2006-02-27T17:28:00.000+08:00

"Mythical Man Month" is a term popularized by Fred Brooks, via his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. This book is the reason I fell in love with the field of Software Engineering. As this blog is going to be for sharing Software Engineeirng related resources I found to be interesting (and I can't think of a more interesting SE-resource than MMM), I thought to name this blog in honor of MMM. While i'm at it, let me repeat Brook's Law:

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later!"

Take that!!!

Another Day in Mythical Man Month

Quotes for software engineers

Tags:software engineering

Students shun computer science for no good reason?

Tags: software engineering

Feeling joy without having fun

Tags: software engineering

Display the words "Hello, world" at the top left corner of the screen

Tags: software engineering

Personal Branding for Software Engineers???

Tags: software engineering

Scott McNealy No Longer Runs the 'Joint'

Tags: software engineering, Java

Dilbert has the best job in America?

Tags: software engineering

Prefactoring: Why I Look Forward to Reading the Book

Tags: software engineering, prefactoring

My daily dose of "blogs from the trenches"

Jolt Awards to Continue...

Intentional Programming - It's not dead yet...

The Beloved Gang Member!

Did Russians Really Use a Pencil to Write During Space Travel?

Jolt Winners are Out! For the Last Time!!

How I improve my Software Engineering knowledge, while my wife chooses clothes...!

I'd rather go fly a kite...

Feel like "Agitating" your source code? Now you can!

Maintaining Future Web Applications: It's Time to Brace Ourselves

Attack of the (Software) Clones !!!

Sun Tech Days 2006 (Singapore)

Floating Down the Waterfall

Mythical What?