Tweaking Outlook to work With GMail

I have not yet managed to give up on email clients. I know that the "new generation" has long ago switched and is using a web client to manage mail, but I still like the use experience that outlook gives me (along with its calendar). The trouble is that working on multiple machine require some tweaking to make it comfortable. Downloading emails to multiple machines The trouble starts fro using the pop3 protocol. in general that protocol is aimed for a single machine use and when you download email to a given client, even if the messages are left on the server they are not downloaded to another machine. One possibility is setting up GMail to use IMAP but I personally don't like this kind of setup. luckily there's a way to work around this: Using POP on multiple clients or mobile devices...

Read more »

Posted in: outlook,tips

Versioning Scheme

There are various scheme for handling version number. But so far I haven't really encountered anything meaningful in any of the schemes. several days ago I encountered scheme which I really liked. The scheme is a variant of Change Significance and is specifically aimed for API libraries, that is while I'm sure it can be extended to regular products, its basic semantics is for aimed for API's libraries. and the semantics goes like this (using a four digit sequence): a change in the first number means the API has changed in a breaking manner. a change in the second number means there were additions to the API and a change in the third number means an that the internal behavior Last number is a sequential build number. Let take for example NUnit, if NUnit will adopt this...

Read more »

Posted in: ALM,Random Thoughts,tips,tools

TDD Problems for Practice

Every time I look or hear a TDD lecture, I always see the same examples. While its hard to go very deep in a 30-60 minutes lecture, the common used examples doesn't really reflects a real life scenario. How many in our daily job are coding a calculator? When I'm asked (which happens 90% of the time) if I have more "real life" example I redirect to the TDD Problem Site: The aim of this site is to contain a growing collection of software problems well-suited for the TDD-beginner and apprentice to learn Test-Driven Development through problem solving. and the real cool good thing about those problems are that they follow the following rules: they are real-world, not just toys they are targeted towards learning TDD (that is: they are small and easy enough to work out in say half...

Read more »

Posted in: Engineering Practices,TDD

Myth Busted - NOT

In a recent post Scott Ambler starts by claiming Agile Myth:High Quality Costs Less than Low Quality - Busted! (at scale) later on when reading the actual content Ive learnt that he refers to very specific cases : For example, in situations where the regulatory compliance scaling factor is applicable, particularly regulations around protecting human life (i.e. the FDA's CFR 21 Part 11), you find that some of the URPS requirements require a greater investment in quality which can increase overall development cost and time. and This is particularly true when you need to start meeting 4-nines requirements (i.e. the system needs to be available 99.99% of the time) let alone 5-nines requirements or more. The cost of thorough...

Read more »

Posted in: Agile practices,Engineering Practices,Quality

Evolving Design - Its a must!

A couple of days ago I read Gil's post about "Good Design Is Not Objective", in it he writes So are there "good" or "bad" designs? Every person has an opinion. Opinions change over time. Problems and technologies change over time, and a design can help or interfere with the project, but you'll know that in hindsight. Yesterday, at one of my client a simple question turned into a related discussion. One of the software architectures asked me if I ever saw (and what do I think of) a system which uses a global variable repository. One that every part of the system could use at will  to store data and is used as way of communicating between various parts of the system. Apparently that kind of an approach is used in their system and he wanted to know what I would say. After thinking...

Read more »

Posted in: Agile Values,Design,Engineering Practices