Professional
One of the things I am seeing less of lately is the understanding that reasonable people can and will disagree with one another—without either of them being any the less reasonable or intelligent for doing so. It seems to me that people become so invested with the “rightness” of their ideas that they deny the possibility that those who disagree with them may be equally intelligent and well-informed. You see it a lot in politics, but I think that this attitude has crept into development discussions as well. I saw a manifestation of this in action after a...
I’m on record as dissenting from some of the planks of the Alt.Net bandwagon. I question design for testability and have extended that to questioning what I consider to be the over-use of Dependency Injection (though I’ve also talked about using it successfully in a project that I believe warranted its use). Further, in my last post, I asked if the Alt.Net folks couldn’t expand their treatments of design principles to include contra-indications or fault points. I also decried those who actively stifle alternative viewpoints, though I left it vague about who I think might do so. Given...
Many of the interesting .Net bloggers are part of the Alt.Net crowd; evangelizing Dependency Injection, Design for Testability, Test Driven Development, SOLID design and other development practices that they find useful in their work. It doesn’t take long reading these blogs to pick up on what looks like an unforgiving attitude towards those who don’t use the latest acronyms in their software development. This acrimony is unfortunate because most often what is at the heart of those who question the standard Alt.Net toolset isn’t so much principle as it is context. A Fundamental Assumption Unfortunately, discussing...
The latest .Net Rocks podcast was from a panel at TechEd 2008 (that I sadly missed while there). Richard Campbell was the moderator and the topic was Software Quality. It was a good, if somewhat one-sided discussion and I recommend giving it a listen if you are so inclined. I particularly liked Billy Hollis' perspective on quality because it was a perspective that was grounded in both reality and sound business principles. He kept bringing up quality in terms of trade-offs and the others kept trying to waltz around those comments with a more absolutist, almost dogmatic, vision...
The discussion spawned from my TDD post has been interesting to me. I've enjoyed the comments by Phil on his post and by him and others on my own. I'm particularly flattered that one of the authors of the original study dropped by. I disagree with some of his points, but this isn't where I want to address them. Instead, I want to examine the discussion itself because this is definitely something that we as a software development community could be better at.
The Report
First, I want to emphasize something that I could have made clearer in my original post....
Reading the beginning of Joel’s second section of his talk at Yale clarified one reason I find myself so at odds with much of the hard-core Dependency Injection crowd (has Joel really achieved the level of fame that we can dispense with using his last name as Phil Haack suggests? Did you know who I meant right off?). Anyway, I am an in-house developer in a small company and that has a huge effect on my architectural decisions.
In-house Development
I described it a couple of months ago as simply "small company development", but Joel’s right that the more significant aspect...
When I go over the tools that I use for software development, it's not actually true (as a friend recently accused) that "if it isn't produced by Microsoft, Jacob won't use it." Still, while I don't hesitate to use tools not produced by Microsoft, there's no denying that the majority of what I use day-to-day has its origins in Redmond, Washington. The question Microsoft's detractors need to be asking themselves is why that might be the case.
It's Not the Hot and Cold Running Babes
Because here's the cold, hard truth: there's not a thing in it for me to continue using...
I wrote last month about winning arguments in IT. Earlier this week, Phil Haack asked a question (through Twitter) about things he could do to help convince a company to create an in-house QA department. Well, it turns out that I did exactly that at XanGo—successfully pushed for and oversaw the installation of an in-house QA department. I thought it might be a useful follow-up to the previous post to use this as an example of how I "won" that argument.
Concentrate on What is Best for the Company
This is the key, the whole key and nothing but the key to winning...