alvin's blog

A couple of best practices today. First, a brief discussion on how to estimate software development projects using Function Points. Second, a discussion on the impact of physical distance between users and developers in the software development process.

In the software development industry, the physical distance between developers and users is an important, often-overlooked variable to the success of a project. I'm currently working on a project where my development team is several hundred yards away from our users, and we're also in another building. Because developers don't seem to like telephones, or perhaps don't like talking to other people that aren't developers, I contend that this 300 yards could easily be 30 miles.

Here's a tip courtesy of Computer Shopper: Every once in a while I've found a need to print a directory listing on my Windows computer. It only happens once or twice a year, but there are definitely times when I go "Man, I wish I could print the contents of my C:\Projects directory", or something similar. I don't know why MS hasn't built this into Windows.

Today I ran into a need for my old friend the Linux tee command. With the tee command you can read input from an input stream, and split the output stream in two directions, so it is both displayed on screen (stdout) and also re-direct it to a file. I needed to do this today when I wanted to monitor something that was running slow, and also keep an output log of the long-running process.

I've created several new LaTeX tips in the last 12 hours and posted them in my LaTeX blog area. This includes tips/tutorials/examples on how to create your own commands; how to use the "html" package; and how to use the "versions" package.