Open Kosmaczewski

Nailing down the idea, the navigation and the UI of your next killer iPhone application is as important (if not more) as writing good code. This is why this post will showcase some recent iPhone designer products, all providing a paper-based, iPhone-shaped and iPhone-sized support for sketching out iPhone apps with your client (or just [...]

A recent comment by Joe D’Andrea in a previous post reminded me about the importance of removing compiler warnings in Xcode projects. Most importantly, it reminded me of a conversation with a fellow developer a couple of weeks ago, in which he told me that he was surprised to see that my projects compiled all [...]

A Cooperative Organization:
(…) Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication.
Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest to a [...]

This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.
The dot-com boom of the 90’s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other languages, [...]

In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project. Three developers were working in an ad hoc basis, creating a software application for an important client (a government office in Lausanne), without any kind of detailed formal specification, without any kind of design documentation, and with strong [...]

While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.
When in some situations it is not legally possible to use [...]

Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level [...]

Using Python’s own unittest package, here’s a small script that can iterate over your test suite to output a small, quick, nice list of the tests in your application:

import unittest

loader = unittest.TestLoader()
tests = loader.loadTestsFromName(‘path.to.your.tests.package’)
for test in tests._tests:
print test._tests[0].__class__.__name__.replace(“Test”, “”)
for method in test._tests:
[...]

Those who read my blog know that I tend to write about software quality issues fairly often; particularly about open spaces and my aversion against them :)
I thought it was time to group all those entries into a Wordpress category of its own: “Quality”. Feel free to check the articles in there, and of course, [...]

Introduction
Total Quality Management is one of the founding pillars of modern mass-production economy, of which the software industry is by far the youngest (and most rebel) child. This article will provide a short discussion on some TQM principles and about their applicability to software projects.