Tag Archives: process

Thoughts on Collective Code Ownership

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Matthias

Agile software development methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP) propagate collective code ownership: Every developer is allowed (and encouraged) to make changes wherever necessary. But is this really a realistic, useful approach?

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Getting Started With Existing Code

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Matthias

Software developers often have to work with existing code bases, whether it’s for joining an ongoing development effort or for maintenance work on a legacy application. Getting familiar with foreign code takes time and can be a frustrating experience. In … Continue reading →

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Effective E-Mail Processing

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Matthias

Spam filters are supposed to take care of unsolicited E-Mail and they save us lots and lots of time each day. But what about all that stuff from inside your organization that is only loosely relevant to your work or … Continue reading →

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Release Management in Open Source Projects

Posted on April 25, 2007 by Matthias

During my work in open source projects, I observed several ways of dealing with software releases, ranging from chaos up to well-defined release processes. In this article, I’m going to describe two common patterns of dealing with releases from a … Continue reading →

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Lightweight Package Management using Stow

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Matthias

Package management tools like apt-get make it very easy to install and remove software. The package manager takes care of downloading the package together with its dependencies if, of course, someone has taken the time to create a package and … Continue reading →

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