Working Too Hard

The past few weeks have been very busy at work. The good thing is, it has been very productive. I feel like we are starting to get a handle on agile development and we are seeing pretty good results.

Software development is very much a "what have you done for me lately?" career. It doesn't matter if you delivered your last project early and it wowed everyone. If your current project is late, you're in for it. I think we are getting back on track and agile is helping us deliver often, which shows our progress. At the end of August, we were given 4 projects and asked if we could deliver them all by the end of the year. 3 were small projects, one was big. As of right now, one has been delivered and is in use; one has been delivered and is in use, but still has some defects to fix (will be done by today); one has been completed, pending some requested changes from the demo, and will be in place and running by Dec 1; the other is in it's 2nd 2 week iteration with more features completed during the 1st than planned. Even though I feel like we can meet our goal, I will still be amazed if we reach it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Listening: Would? - Alice in Chains

Veteran of the Psychic Wars

Kevin Drum says Congress evades its own responsibility for war

Listening: Black Ice - John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess

A Fool Such As I

Sometimes I doubt my intelligence when writing code. This morning I was working along, writing code and tests, running them in nUnit. I added a new test and some code and suddenly got an error in nUnit:

nunit-gui.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

I had the option to Debug or Close. I closed it, looked at my test and didn't see anything out of whack, so I tried it again. Same issue. So the next time I chose to Debug. I loaded it into my open copy of VS 2005 and got the message below.

This was on the code in my service that the unit test was calling. So I look at the code a little closer.

public DataSet GetPrimeInvoices(string employeeCode)

{

return this.GetPrimeInvoices(employeeCode);

}

See anything wrong with that?

The function I was calling was an overload of another function that took 2 parameters. I forgot to add the 2nd parameter to the call, so it was just calling itself until it crashed. I added the 2nd parameter

public DataSet GetPrimeInvoices(string employeeCode)

{

return this.GetPrimeInvoices(employeeCode, Level.ProjectManager);

}

I reran my tests and got the beautiful green dot...




Listening: Mr. Soul - Rush

Am I Evil?

I'm tired of the comment spam! So anyone who wants to comment will now have to use word verification. I'm sorry to my 2 readers that you will have to go through this ordeal, but I can't handle the spam anymore.

Now I will never have any comments because no one ever reads this except the spammers!


Listening: Fife and Drum - John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess

A Little Bit More

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
--Thomas Jefferson

I'm in a good mood today because I passed my 2nd Microsoft certification exam this morning (See my other blog). And now I can start reading the book I got from Amazon yesterday: User Stories Applied : For Agile Sotware Development by Mike Cohn.

Listening: My Black Cadillac - Lightnin' Hopkins