Entries from October 2007 ↓

Many large scale projects hope to reduce the development cycle by combining design documents into one, so called ‘MD200′. In fact it not only delays code delivery, but also hinders the design flaws and solution interaction. Functional and technical design documents are completely different documents in terms of both contents and audience.

I suggest investing significant amount of time into the technical design documents. The technical design documents must contain a full set of UML diagrams to describe flows within the solution and inter solution dependencies; a complete set of pseudo logic, queries, error handling etc.

By the time technical design passes the acception by the technical lead or solution architect, it reaches the quality where a developer of any qualification can assemble an effective code within a short and manageable period of time. This is how high quality of the delivered code with offshore development centers must be achieved.

Many large implementations which we took part in, have volumes of development standards document which nobody reads. Truly, one need to be a saint to read 50+ pages of text and memorize intricacies of naming. What we find useful, is having a cheat-sheet with most ‘critical’ standards whose violation render severe damage to the development process. Adjusted to my current implementation the cheat sheet or survivor’s guide looks like this. Continue reading →

There is a great article about JFreeChart on OTN. We used this library in earlier versions of Hermes and liked it a lot. Though, the general direction with Hermes is to report using Excel or other reporting tools, we may bring some visual reports back into it using JFreeChart.