Peter Ritchie's MVP Blog : General

Software Process and Reduction of Quality

PeterRitchie — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:51:00 GMT

Ken Schwaber had a conversation with Scott Hanselman about the concept of "done". He said that software developers have a habit of culling down all the generally accepted practices of software development except the writing of code. He says that, when pushed, software developers reduce quality in an effort to produce a software product by a certain time. This leads to a huge debt that must eventually be paid.

These generally accepted practices include things like unit testing, refactoring, design, documentation, etc. In the case of producing an API or and SDK, I believe these practices includes community involvement. When a team developing an SDK, API, or IDE "goes dark", they're not doing their job properly--they're ignoring the fundamental reason for their work: the customer. This is a huge problem in our industry because software developers are effectively trained that schedules only include writing code and meetings.

I agree with Ken and would say that part of an Agile process includes a significant amount of time to communicate with customers need be scheduled.

Even if not professing to using an Agile methodology, if unit tests, integration tests, refactoring, and research don't take up a significant amount of the software development schedule or there's no scheduling of a significant amount of time to communicate with customers; the team is inept. In this day and age, I would hazard to say its downright felonious and fraudulent.

Location of unit tests.

PeterRitchie — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:24:00 GMT

I had a short conversation at Alt.Net Canada about the location of unit tests. I personally tend towards a distinct unit test project. But, I deal with mostly commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) projects where I simply can't ship code like that. I also don't want to wire-off the unit test via #if because I would then be shipping something different than that which was tested.

From an enterprise application point of view, this is different. I would have no problem including the unit tests within their respective project as production code

DevTeach 2008

PeterRitchie — Sun, 11 May 2008 19:32:00 GMT

Well, I'm off to DevTeach Toronto 2008. Track me down and say hi if you're going...

Routing and Remote Access, NAT, and Internet connection sharing.

PeterRitchie — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:14:00 GMT

I've got a Windows 2000 Server running Routing and Remote Access with the NAT functionality to route my Internet connection through a computer running a firewall, etc.

This works well, I can share my Internet amongst my local network while offering a bit more security.

The problem is, Routing and Remote Access often gets confused and can't perform DNS lookups and therefore blows Internet connection sharing out of the water. This seems to occur if the radio/modem loses power.

Until recently, the only way I found that rectified the problem (sometimes) is by rebooting the server. As you might understand, this is a real pain. But, recently I happened across a series of actions that seems to get Routing and Remote Access back up and running. I can managed to fix the connection sharing if I perform the following steps in the exact order:

Stop the Routing and Remote Access service.
Release the the IP address assigned to the NIC connected to the ISP and used with NAT.
Renew the IP address of above NIC.
Start the Routing and Remote Access service.

This turns out to be more reliable than rebooting the server. There's been a couple of times I've had to reboot twice.

Please correct me if there's a better way or post if this problem doesn't exist in later version of Windows Server (I don't have the resources to upgrade at the moment).

I post here for posterity, my own reference, and anyone else you happens to find it.

keywords: Reset NAT RRAS DNS remoteaccess ipconfig net stop start release renew

Welcome

PeterRitchie — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 14:30:00 GMT

On 1-jul-06 I was awarded MVP Visual Development - C#. Microsoft has been so kind as to offer blog space here on msmvps.com; and, I've been looking for a better blog, so I'll be moving my blog here.

I should be a little more prolific with by blog from here on in.

Welcome to my new blog.