project muni-muni

Published 03-30-2007 11:12 AM | barakoboy
we delivered the software with an hour to spare.  software development projects just aren't as fun and exciting if you don't  let murphy impose his law upon it.

it has been said hundreds of times before, and yes i will say it again: PEOPLE, NOT TOOLS, MAKE GOOD SOFTWARE.  and for this project i have been blessed with a great team, one with people with the right attitude, work ethics, and dedication to quality. 

i'm not saying that tools aren't necessary.  on the contrary, having the right tools can and will make your life easier.  it just saddens me that some companies would rather invest in tools (or in all that cmm certification crap) than in their people, and this mentality seems to abound in our country. 

on my way home last night i went over the right decisions that were made (by me or my company) during the course of the project  that helped us deliver what was required.  here are some of those:

1. we used appfuse

yes, hibernate was great.  yes, spring was a big help.  yes, displaytag saved us a lot of time.  yes xfire kicks ass. but at the end of the day, if you can't bind them all seamlessly together then you may have a lot of work in your hands in the future.  appfuse just takes all of these integration concerns out of your hands and lets you focus more on the business requirements.  after all, at the end of the day the client isn't at all concerned if you used the latest and greatest version of ABC framework or XYZ library.  what they want to see is a product that does what they said it should do.

you may have the best technologies in your project, but if you can't deliver what is expected then you don't have much.

making a new module? no problem.  make your domain objects, put the necessary xdoclet tags (we weren't using the latest version of appfuse so annotations weren't supported yet), run the code generator, and you're done.  DAOs, configuration files, database tables, and all the other necessary classes are automagically created for you.  tweak it a bit to suit your taste and you have the baseline of your module. 

2. we used jira

jira, by leaps and bounds, is the best issue tracking system i have used ... EVER.  bugs are a fact of life in software development, and managing these can make or break a project if you let them run amuck.

jira makes tracking all of these extremely easy, and creating tickets would take just a couple of seconds of your time.  found a bug? then make an entry!  i've experienced using a crappy bug tracking system that took almost 2 minutes to create a record, and in the end i ended up just using a spreadsheet or verbally telling someone that something was wrong.  tools are supposed to make your life easier, not make it more complicated.

3. we used luntbuild

continuous integration is essential in any software development endeavor.  i've used cruisecontrol in the past and it did the job.  it was, however,  a pain to configure.  luntbuild lets you configure everything from a web interface within a couple of minutes.

i've read that hudson is even simpler to use.  haven't used it but am extremely interested in giving it a test drive.

off the top of my head those were the essential things that went well.  there are probably some more but i'm too lazy to list all of them down.  maybe i'll mention some of them in future posts.
Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

# cruizer said on March 29, 2007 8:38 PM:

ikaw ba ito paolo?

# barakoboy said on March 29, 2007 8:56 PM:

guilty your honor  :D

# cruizer said on March 29, 2007 9:04 PM:

#2 was a giveaway! :D

of course i agree with all the stuff you said. tools don't make software, but they can sure make it easier to make working software :)

# jokiz said on March 30, 2007 2:17 AM:

hey hey, another cormant guy in the house!

welcome pao! and congrats to your project, ganda nga ng lineup nyo!  keep posting, so we learn a lot of stuff from a java master.  leaving blogspot?

# barakoboy said on March 30, 2007 3:28 AM:

salamat joey!  i haven't updated my blogspot stuff in ages.  i think i'll be more active here in devpinoy.  :D

# cruizer said on March 30, 2007 11:22 PM:

yay! we need more java experts like you in devpinoy...minsan kami-kaming .NET dev lang andito (save for lamia and javazealot), nakaka-lonely. mas masaya pag kumpleto pati asaran at balitaktakan :D

# keithrull said on March 31, 2007 10:00 AM:

Welcome to DevPinoy Paolo!

# lamia said on April 2, 2007 1:11 AM:

Yehey! More Java guys! :)

# barakoboy said on April 6, 2007 6:36 AM:

thanks for the warm welcome everyone!

# Greg Moreno said on November 11, 2007 12:32 AM:

xfire kicks ass?

Unfortunately, that was not my experience in my former job :)