05.26.06

Bandera Released but Starts Long Slumber

Posted in SAnToS at 1:42 am by Todd

Well, the Bandera group (and by that I mean me) has finally finished the 1.0a4 release. The a4 means it is the fourth alpha release on the road to 1.0. Unfortunately, the trip down that road will be delayed for an undefined amount of time due to budget and time constraints. So the Bandera codebase will move into a hibernation mode where spring won’t appear on a regular time frame (sorry for the bear analogy, couldn’t come up with any other light-hearted thing to say that makes the hibernation less depressing).

So I will now be shifted entirely over to the Cadena project. This should be a lot of fun since it will require a lot of learning of new things as well as working on a stable, well-designed codebase (way to go Jesse!). Not only that, but it will allow me to really dig into developing for Eclipse (up to this point I have only used it to develop Bandera and toyed with creating plugins).

So, good news for me and Cadena but bad news for users and extenders of Bandera. So I extend my apologies to those users and extenders of Bandera. I would also express my apologies to users of Cadena since you lose Jesse and get me instead but that would probably not display confidence in the groups ability to anyone wanting to give us more money!

05.05.06

Of Specifications and Tests

Posted in Programming at 7:46 am by Todd

One of my favorite bloggers is Brian Marick. I have been reading him on a very regular basis over the last year. This isn’t because I agree with everything he has to say (I do agree with some of it) or because he is the only source on testing, agile methods, or any other corner of the knowledge market (hopefully this doesn’t come across as an insult). I read his stuff because he is very good at explaining complex ideas in a very simple fashion (so simple minded people like myself can understand). I was reminded of this reason when I read his blog entry about Tests and specifications. I suggest everyone that creates software read this and make every attempt to understand it.

Anyway, enjoy this little nugget of information (and let me know if you think he is off his rocker … I would be happy to discuss the issue at length).