66
votes
Accepted
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
It seems to me there is a contradiction in policy here.
On the one hand, the firm has outsourced testing because it consumed programmers' time excessively, and could be done more cheaply by others.
...
- 10.3k
36
votes
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
Bottom line: this is a cultural problem.
I come from the viewpoint that competent programmers at least write unit tests for the more complex parts of their code. The problem is not everyone shares ...
- 46.2k
28
votes
Accepted
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this. It's highly context sensitive.
One of the biggest factors is risk. You want to do just enough up-front design and planning to bring the risk to a tolerable ...
- 83.7k
19
votes
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
Okay, we all share the common goal of protecting and defending developers but there are some things in your question that make me somewhat uncomfortable...
They also don't see why fixing a problem ...
- 2,472
13
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
This boils down to time management and a measured approach to risk. First consider where your stakeholders stand -- While not universally true, it's typically the case that stakeholders prefer the ...
- 12.1k
11
votes
Understanding LSB and MSB
TL;DR:
The following function will do the conversion from physical value to 16-bit code:
short valueToCode(double value) {
return round(16.0 * value);
}
Long explanation
An unsigned 16-bit ...
- 6,037
11
votes
Accepted
Why do MMS require "mobile data" to be sent/received?
MMS was conceived as a way of adding multimedia capabilities to SMS, not as an internet messaging platform. It uses a set of technologies which made sense in the mobile ecosystem of the time, but are ...
- 5,877
10
votes
Accepted
How to let others developer know what was tried and didn't work?
By writing it down as a comment at a prominent place of the code which realizes "Design B"!
Which place one chooses depends on the specific situation, whatever feature this is, whatever "Design B" ...
- 212k
10
votes
Accepted
Using the word "loop" as a subject in a sentence
This is close to "list of things" or "opinion-based", but I'll risk it anyway, as clear communication about code is part of our profession in my opinion(sic).
This loop operates ...
- 17.1k
9
votes
Understanding LSB and MSB
That’s poorly written documentation. They’re assuming that you know they’re using a Fixed Point number format.
LSB 0.0625 and MSB 2048
This would have been more easily understood if it was ...
- 8,981
9
votes
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
Don't just assume you're right about over reliance on integration testing. You're pushing for the wrong things. Be very careful about driving people to measurable results vs actual results.
...
- 112k
9
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
There are projects for which that's a totally valid approach. Safety-critical ones, for example. You've already spotted that the deep dive process lets you identify risks earlier.
The challenge is to ...
- 14.6k
8
votes
Accepted
Is it generally helpful to include JIRA issues in code comments?
I would try to avoid such comments. Although I think there is a place for them where you have a particularly annoying requirement. Which without, anyone might want to refactor the code. eg.
//must ...
- 78.5k
8
votes
What is a good diagrammatic way to represent async event communication between two systems?
The UML sequence diagram is well adapted to represent an interaction between several objects (or components or, why not,systems). It has semantic to make the difference between synchronous and ...
- 79.9k
8
votes
Accepted
Why wouldn't my team want to run unit tests automatically?
Firstly, thank you to @Gnat for finding insight into the real issue here and giving me what I needed to know to get to the real issue.
We have agreed to isolate the unit tests and integration tests ...
- 856
8
votes
Who is the potential audience of a commit message?
Good commit messages are underrated, in my opinion, kudos to you for trying to improve in this aspect.
I think the primary audience for commit messages are other developers. There might be other ...
- 311
6
votes
Why wouldn't my team want to run unit tests automatically?
I'm managing a team in .net.
Doesn't matter.
They are writing unit tests ... and only wants to run them once a week or so.
Unit tests are not run once a week. You run them before and after ...
- 112k
6
votes
Accepted
Explaining why a code's modifier should also be its committer
Personally I wouldn't even try to break a large chunk of code into lots of little commits. You're bound to end up with intermediate versions that don't work anyway. Just check the whole lot in in ...
- 9,646
6
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
How do you decide how much depth of knowledge is enough?
As the title of the old song goes: There are more questions than answers.
Simply put: you need enough information to be able to make an ...
- 9,815
6
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
You should research a new feature to the level of detail you need to begin working on it and to estimate how long implementing it will take you to a reasonable degree of certainty.
You don't need to ...
- 179
6
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
This is where a diverse team is helpful. It's not a bad thing to methodically gather context on a problem, but you need someone to help you stop at a certain point and actually implement something.
...
- 148k
6
votes
Is there some standard or virtually standard way to document code in a language agnostic and IDE agnostic fashion?
There is no standard. It all depends on the specific tool that you use for generating the documentation.
On one hand, you have language-specific tools like Javadoc for Java, Scaladoc for Scala, rdoc ...
- 83.7k
5
votes
Why wouldn't my team want to run unit tests automatically?
but they keep bringing up fears of the builds being too slow, or what happens when the tests prevent an urgent build.
What happens if you should prevent an urgent build because you're about to commit ...
- 25.3k
5
votes
Is it generally helpful to include JIRA issues in code comments?
For Code Comments, there is very little usefulness. For version control comments, they are very useful for reasons outlined below.
Code comments really should be used to help understand the intent ...
- 46.2k
5
votes
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
I'm firmly in the 100% automated coverage camp. I think it actually helps me go faster in the long term, and I hate having things kicked back to me from a tester.
That being said, if people hate ...
- 148k
5
votes
Accepted
Who is the potential audience of a commit message?
There can be several potential readers with different expectations:
A reviewer going over your code will read the commit message for context and to understand the rationale for the new code.
Your ...
- 9,525
4
votes
Accepted
What strategy to better articulate myself when summarising technical details
Make a short note in advance which points you need to mention in what order. Doesn't need to be detailed at all. That should help a lot with keeping your speaking reasonably structured and on point.
...
- 51.3k
4
votes
Company outsourced testing; how can we encourage programmers to stop overly relying on testers?
A couple of points I'm not really seeing in the other answers.
The skill sets for development and testing may overlap but some people make great testers, and sometimes they're not the same people ...
- 149
4
votes
Why do MMS require "mobile data" to be sent/received?
For the same reason you cannot send SMS over Wifi, it's a protocol for sending "Multimedia Messages" over the cellular phone networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- 380
4
votes
How can you decide how much detail is it worth going in to when planning a new feature?
You talk about "planning a new feature" but I'm not clear whether you are separating specification of the feature from implementation of the feature. It's a good idea to keep these as ...
- 3,569
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible