PUBLIC MARKS from mbertier with tags dev & "groupe:clever age"

In this paper, we provide a new two­fold solution – automated merging of changes that are done by a software provider after installation and manual merging of changes performed by the user thereafter. While some manual intervention is required in this approach, it is a more reliable solution. This approach also includes a tool to ease the manual file comparison and merge process.

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Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al’s Design Patterns and Alexanders’ equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as “replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality”.

Submitting patches to Open Source code doesn't come naturally to everyone.

For too long, code reviews have been too much of a chore. This is largely due to the lack of quality tools available, leaving developers to resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based solutions. At VMware, we've traditionally done code reviews over e-mail. A significant amount of time was wasted in forming review requests, switching between the diff and the e-mail, and trying to understand what parts of the code the reviewer was referring to. We decided to fix all that.

it started out simple, but grew to be pretty powerful and useful quickly. It was designed to automate and simplify the process of creating review requests and actually reviewing code.

Recently I began to write a paper on TDD Anti-Patterns, and decided to first quickly jot down some of the most common ones that others or myself have encountered “in the wild.”

Should you throw an exception, or return null? Should you use checked or unchecked exceptions? For many novice to mid-level developers, exception handling tends to be an afterthought. Their typical pattern is usually a simple try/catch/printStackTrace(). When they try to get more creative, they usually stumble into one or more common exception handling antipatterns.

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is an evolution in the thinking behind TestDrivenDevelopment and AcceptanceTestDrivenPlanning.

We suggest, therefore, that it is wrong to assume that FLOSS projects are distinguished by a particular social structure merely because they are FLOSS. Our findings suggest that FLOSS projects might have to work hard to achieve the expected development advantages which have been assumed to flow from "going open." In addition, the variation in communications structure across projects means that communications centralization is useful for comparisons between FLOSS teams. We found that larger FLOSS teams tend to have more decentralized communication patterns, a finding that suggests interesting avenues for further research examining, for example, the relationship between communications structure and code modularity.

Most software version control systems provide mechanisms for branching into multiple lines of development and merging source code from one development line into another. However, the techniques, policies and guidelines for using these mechanisms are often misapplied or not fully understood. This is unfortunate, since the use or misuse of branching and merging can make or break a parallel software development project. Streamed Lines is a pattern language for organizing related lines of development into appropriately diverging and converging streams of source code changes.

This is the first in a series of articles, discussing why many software rewrite projects end badly and what to do to avoid some of the ways I've seen them go astray.