Do you feel that your development group too reliant on Outlook? Have you reached a point that you have to search your email for pertinent information when asked? What are you using? I realized things had gotten out of hand a couple weeks ago over a weekend. I was at my in-laws house (in the country, no PC/laptop, no internet connection; and I get an ......

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"A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot ......

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Was working on a windows form app (something I haven't done in a while), adding threading and logging so that it would work a little more smoothly and have a record of who did what. I was just about at the point where I was going to check it into source control when I noticed that the Output window was showing "A first chance exception of type 'System.InvalidCastException' ......

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Thoughts on streamlining the process of getting someone up to speed when they join a project as a new hire; or as is common in some companies, switch from one project to another: Has anyone heard of a strategy (including emphasis towards consistent, ongoing documentation) that would bring a user up to speed quickly? Has there been any thought given ......

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I have to deal with all types of code that was written by people from different organizations, different countries, using different languages, obviously standards are different across these sources. One of the biggest headaches that I ahve come across is how people differ in the formatting of their SQL statements, specifically stored procs. When you ......

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Is it just me, or does being a developer suck at times. That Lumburg-esque speech about having to work a weekend kills me. If it weren't for the fact that so much of what I do coule be outsourced without a second thought, I would say that programmers need to be the next group to unionize. Bad planning and over-promising in our industry need to be cleaned ......

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Gotta flame on the contractor species. Embedded journalists (like those you saw during the most recent invasion of Iraq), were there to protect themselves and share the information that they learned with the world. On the other hand, and Embedded Contractor is someone that works a contract for a long time and learns information, but DOES NOT share that ......

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Skipped directly from XP to Windows 7, and every once in a while I run across something that makes me feel really juvenile. I was recently trying to pass a directory structure to an offsite developer who was having configuration issues so that they could compare their project structure to what was running on the server. So I requested access to the ......

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One of the hardest things for some managers to understand is that fighting for "regression testing" time with your customers can save you time in the long run. At work we are currently focusing on a regression sprint; where everyone including developers are re-testing existing items from previous sprints. Instead of our normally assigned bug/development ......

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I have been running Windows 7 64 business / IE 8 for about 2 months now, and it's interesting to say that this version of Windows is the most stable that I have ever worked with. That is, if you exclude IE8. I am at my pc for 10-14 hours a day, and I will honestly say that its a GOOD day when IE crashes less than 6 times. It seems to happen most often ......

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