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• What are benefit/drawbacks of classifying defects during a peer code review

  - by DXM

  About 3 months ago, our engineering group rolled out Review Board to be used for all peer code reviews. Today, I had a discussion with one of the people involved in that process and found out that we are already looking for a replacement (possibly something commercial) because of several missing features. One of the features that is apparently asked by many people is the ability to classify/categorize each code review comment (i.e. is it a style issue, coding convention, resource leak, logic error, crash... whatever). For those teams that regularly practice code review, is this categorization a common practice? Do you do it? have you done it in the past? Is it good/bad? On one hand, it gives the team some more metrics and possibly will indicate more specific areas where developers may potentially need to be trained in (at least that seems to be the argument). Are there other benefits? And on the other hand, and this is my concern, is that it will slow down code review process that much more. As a team lead, I've done a fairly large share of reviews, and I've always liked the ability, to highlight a chunk of code, hammer off a comment and move on as fast as possible. Although I haven't tried it personally, I have a feeling that expanding that combo box every time and scrolling/searching for the right category would feel like something is tripping you. Also if we start keeping metrics on this stuff, my other concern is that valuable code review meeting time will be spent on arguing whether something is a logic error or if it should be classified as a crash.

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• GitHub: Are there external tools for managing issues list vs. project backlog

  - by DXM

  Recently I posted one of my the projects1 on GitHub and as I was exploring capabilities of the site, I noticed they have a rather decent issue tracking section. I want to use that section as a) other people can report bugs if they'd like and b) other people can see which bugs I'm aware of. However, as others have noted, issues list cannot be prioritized in order to create a project backlog. For now my backlog has been a text file, but I'd like to be able to have it integrated so the same information isn't maintained in different places. Having a fully ordered list, which is something we also practice at work, has been very useful as I can open one file, start with line 1 and fire off 2 or 3 items in one sitting without having to go back to a full issues/stories bucket. GitHub doesn't offer this. What GitHub does offer is a very nice and clean API so issues can easily be exported into anything else. I've searched to see if there are other websites (like Trello) that integrate with GitHub issues, but did not find anything. Does anyone know of such a product, service or offline tool? Those that use GitHub, what is your experience in managing backlog? I kinda hate the idea of manually managing two disconnected lists like some people seem to be doing with Wiki project pages. 1 - are shameless plugs allowed no this site? Searched but didn't find a definite answer. If it's bad practice, STOP and don't read further As a developer I got sick and tired of navigating to same set of folders 30 times a day, so I wrote a little, auto-collapsible utility that gets stuck to the desktop and allows easy access to the folders you constantly use.

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• In agile environment, how is bug tracking and iteration tracking consolidated.

  - by DXM

  This topic stemmed from my other question about management-imposed waterfall-like schedule. From the responses in the other thread, I gathered this much about what is generally advised: Each story should be completed with no bugs. Story is not closed until all bugs have been addressed. No news there and I think we can all agree with this. If at a later date QA (or worse yet a customer) finds a bug, the report goes into a bug tracking database and also becomes a story which should be prioritized just like all other work. Does this sum up general handling of bugs in agile environment? If yes, the part I'm curious about is how do teams handle tracking in two different systems? (unless most teams don't have different systems). I've read a lot of advice (including Joel's blog) on software development in general and specifically on importance of a good bug tracking tool. At the same time when you read books on agile methodology, none of them seem to cover this topic because in "pure" agile, you finish iteration with no bugs. Feels like there's a hole there somewhere. So how do real teams operate? To track iterations you'd use (whiteboard, Rally...), to track bugs you'd use something from another set of products (if you are lucky enough, you might even get stuck with HP Quality Center). Should there be 2 separate systems? If they are separate, do teams spend time creating import/sync functionality between them? What have you done in your company? Is bug tracking software even used? Or do you just go straight to creating a story?

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• TDD: Write a separate test for object initialization or relying on other tests exercising it

  - by DXM

  This seems to be the common pattern that's emerging in some of the tests I've worked on lately. We have a class, and quite often this is legacy code whose design can't be easily altered, which has a bunch of member variables. There's some kind of "Initialize" or "Load" function which would put an object into a valid state. Only after it is initialized/loaded, are the members in the proper state so that other methods can be exercised. So when we start writing tests, first test is "TestLoad" and all we put in there is exercising initialization logic. Then we might add one (or few) TestLoadFailureXXX tests and those are definitely valuable. Then we start writing tests to verify other behaviors but all of them require the object to be loaded. So they all start by running exactly the same code as "TestLoad". So my question: Is TestLoad even necessary? Do you take it and let other tests simply exercise the loading? Or leave it so things are more explicit? I know that each unit test function should have no (or as little as possible) overlap with other test functions, but it seems like in cases of loading, this is unavoidable. And whether we like it or not, if something in the loading code breaks, we will end up with a whole test suite of failures. Is there another approach that I might be missing here? Thank you for the responses. It definitely makes sense that you want to see "InitializationTest" and if that fails you know where to start looking. In case it matters, this question is mostly about C++ and we use CppUnit framework. And now, thanks to sleske, I'll be constantly wishing that CppUnit supported test dependencies. Might have to hack something in one of these days :)

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• Tracking feature requests for small-scale components

  - by DXM

  I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components. I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself. In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department. What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example... framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share low-level IPC communications framework Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups). Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers. At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right. (I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).

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