20-Oct-2005

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations posts an article, Those strange creatures called clients, a translation of Esas extrañas criaturas llamadas clientes by Sr Martínez published in ESTRATEgA on 19-Oct-2005.

A Programmer's work

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis posts a link to a research paper, Software Development at Microsoft Observed: It’s about people … working together, published by Microsoft. The principle conclusions are:

• Developers go to great lengths to create and maintain rich mental models of code and don’t rely on external representations.

• Understanding the rationale behind code is the biggest problem for developers. When trying to understand a piece of code developers turn first to the code itself and, when that fails, to their social network.

• Developers and development managers use a variety of tools and work practices, and are actively looking for better solutions.

The paper is a fascinating read as it assembles in one place a number of ideas, such as the difficulty of recovering from interruptions or keeping abreast of developments in other modules that might affect our work, and which we programmers have a hard time transmitting to our managers.