Open Kosmaczewski

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 [...]

You might remember my beloved mantras: learning a new programming language and reading at least 6 relevant books every year. Following the 2007 edition, here’s the list of the 8 books I have enjoyed most in 2008, ordered by a purely subjective and absolutely irrational decreasing preference. I strongly recommend all of them!
Winner: Geekonomics: The [...]

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 [...]

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:
[...]

Django has a nice support for unit and functional testing; however, its django.test.client.Client class does not support PUT and DELETE requests, which might be useful if, like me, you’re doing some kind of REST implementation using that framework. There’s an open ticket about it, but for the time being, here’s my wrapper that supports those [...]

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.

Introduction
I strongly consider that the following three items are of high relevance for software project quality:

Developer workplace conditions
Tracking data of past projects
Management commitment to quality

In this article I will give an overview of them, providing some personal experience about each.

I am subscribed to quite a few podcasts and screencasts here and there. And I’ve come up with a very basic (albeit limited and you could even say irrational) way of determining which to keep listening and which to throw away immediately:
The quality of the material… and the voice of the speaker.
I’m not Pavarotti nor [...]