Manuel Klimek

CMake is one of the best build tools out there. It has a nice command line interface and comes with an even nicer GUI. Unfortunately the GUI is MFC based, which means you need a VC professional license to build it for windows and you can’t use it in linux.
Since Trolltech released it’s wonderful GUI [...]

Software is complicated. More often than not it’s a complicated mess. Sometimes even a tangled complicated mess. And wherever you look all you see is tradeoffs. There are no easy solutions ™. The dll hell is replaced by the side-by-side hell. Emacs is better than Vim, Vim is better than the Visual Studio editor and [...]

Today after our planning game I did a short poll on how the guys perceive test driven development and pair programming. We’re trying to do both for some time now, and since I take the blame for introducing both practices, I feel I’m somewhat – um – preoccupied on that matter. A few days ago, [...]

Steve McConnell responds to Eric Wise’s article Rejecting Software Engineering that Rumors of Software Engineering’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated”. There’s a lot of fuzz about the usage of the word “engineering” when it comes to software development. What’s this all about?
What is engineering?
According to wikipedia, engineering is defined by the ECPD as

The creative application of [...]

Are you a developer who dreams about a better software development process in the organization you work for? Maybe you read something about fancy practices on your favorite blog or mayhap you even touched one of those old-style paper collections called books? Do you have some concrete ideas on how to improve, but don’t know [...]

When I arrived at work today I fired up Outlook and checked my mail. I found five mails from our auto-build server telling me that the build broke. Since we introduced test driven development and continuous integration only a short time ago this was not out of nowhere – the build usually breaks at least [...]

Do you estimate the time it will take you to finish your task in the mythical unit called “perfect engineering day”? Have you ever wondered why?

The first human beings had a hard time. When they weren’t on edge due to the Neanderthals who constantly tried to get their unprofitable genes into the big pool again, they had to deal with a real challenge: self reflection.
When I exercise my introspectional skills I often think fondly of my ancestors. I imagine their [...]

Ed carefully tiptoes towards Karl’s desk. “Hey Karl”, he cheerily announces: “I still need this time estimation for the Globster project!”.
“Yea, right… That was the Irish Coffee feature for their coffee machines at the management offices, wasn’t it? I just have to read some specs to figure out what I have to do – give [...]

“What are those five lines of code for?”
“I put them there because … wait, um, they’re, let me see … they sum up x, y and z and calculate some sort of squared nearest neighbor… yep…”
“So, what do they do?”
“I just told you…”
“See, I just found that I couldn’t understand those lines in the current [...]