Check out this little item in eWeek. "Transforming DIY Projects from the Painful to the Productive".

As an outside consultant in a large number of organizations, I've seen a lot of DIY projects—what we used to call "end user computing". Indeed, I've even been hired by the user organizations …

In "Unit Test Case, Subject Matter Experts and Requirements" I suggested that it's often pretty easy to get a spreadsheet of full-worked out examples from subject-matter experts. Indeed, if your following TDD, that spreadsheet of examples is solid gold.

Let's consider something relatively simple. Let's say we're working on some …

Here's a typical "I don't like TDD" question: the topic is "Does TDD really work for complex projects?"

Part of the question focused on the difficulty of preparing test cases that cover the requirements. In particular, there was some hand-wringing over conflicting and contradictory requirements.

Here's what's worked for me …

We're struggling with our Relational Schema. We're not alone, of course, everyone struggles with the relational model. The technology imposes difficult limitations and we work around them.

There's kind of a 4-step process through which the relational schema erodes into irrelevance. The concept of a schema is not irrelevant. It's …

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

I got an email with hundreds of words of content. This part made sense: "...doing wild card searches using Oracle's database engine and are wondering why is it so slow and how do they make it …

Looked interesting enough for someone to email it to me. Still can't figure out why they sent it. Posting this feels like advertising, so perhaps I should charge them a promotional fee.

I have slowly grown to love RESTful web services.

I was asked about a nearly empty section in the code repository labeled "Java client".

"Yes," I said, "it's a place-holder for a Java package that includes classes to wrap our RESTful web services."

"Really?" I was asked, "Why? We use …

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …

I'm looking for a unbiased Python expert to help with a book I'm working on. We need "an unbiased python expert with a keen eye for detail."

The role is technical reviewer. I've never done this before, but it appears that the tech reviewer is a paid position somewhere in …

Many folks use Python's unittest module for integration testing. It sometimes leads to whining and hand-wringing, but it is very effective. Ordinary "unit" tests use mocks and focus on a class or a module more-or-less in isolation. The purists say "complete isolation". But that's sometimes unrealistic. A class that's part …