First Post !

Why this blog ?!?

This is hopefully the start of series of post where I would write about my work in doing software projects both from the software development process as well as the technical/programming issues. And since I am about to embark on a new project (and hopefully I will stay till the end, my department has a habit of moving people around), I feel there is some need to document down the problems, thoughts that might happen during the course of development.

And the place which I work is also a bit interesting/very common ((I dont have the expereince to tell the difference). We do have a lot of processes (means lots of documentation/paper work) before our projects are formally approve and funded. We dont seem to have a process for developing software at a lower level. We have documentation that talks about Risk Management, Issues that crop up during project, Testing plans and so on. These are good and are necessary but what we lack is a framework for actually developing the product, things like timeline, things that programmers must do (unit test's, checking in often, coding conventions, update meetings) are not really spelt out even in individual project teams.

The previous team in which I was in (I joined after the project more or less started and we were gathering requirements) we were managed in a sort of 'loose' way (the developers more or less decided what was to be done next), we only spoke to the project manager occasionaly when met with design issues or to clarify user's operations. We had a lot of trouble integrating each other's work just before demos to the users (we were using SVN but not using a build server). we even had trouble using SVN, each time we update people's IDE profiles were over written (we were using eclipse and the individual developer settings were also checked in causing havoc whenever we updated).

So you can see why I am interested in the whole developement process from start to end, hopefully as I start on my next project. It would be a better one :)

About Me

I do not profess to be any sort of a guru be it in management or programming (I have only been a programmer for 2 years plus, although I have been working for about 6 years in total, 4 of which in a totally different field). And there are much better blogs out there on Software development issues (Joel on Software, NOOL .. etc), so treat this as my point of view, and hopefully someone will comment and feedback.