The Whiteboard

user55340

1:45 AM

@ThomasOwens would you clean up the answers in programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/39541 ? IIRC, programmers.stackexchange.com/a/39559/40980 is completely incorrect and wrong now ( ncees.org/about-ncees/news/… ). Since you've locked it, all of that incorrect information is there forever as is.

user55340

The thing is, the people who know the answers being right / wrong aren't commenting, editing, or curating it. As it was, it was becoming an eyesore.

Lightness Races in Orbit

I was taught that you should never bicycle on an empty stomach; you should bicycle on a cycle path. — Eric Lippert Jan 7 at 14:31

user20683

4:08 AM

user20683

See also: the rest of the Midwest, New England, and most of Canada.

user15026

@WorldEngineer Tonight on my way home there were three people stuck at various points. So also that.

Duga

4:51 AM

It's not actually on-topic on any site in the network. The closest fit is probably Programmers, but you would have to revise it significantly to make it on-topic there. — Ed Cottrell ♦ 8 secs ago

Yannis

7:57 AM

@gnat We've stopped asking other site mod's if it's ok to migrate ever since migration rejection became a thing. We know encourage mods to just migrate, if they honestly believe the question is a good one for the target site. And the target site can reject it if it isn't. It's not ideal, but pinging everyone for a silly migration was a mess /cc @Ixrec

Roy T.

Hey everyone, half way through writing this (programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/306875/…) question I was afraid that it would be rejected. Tried to tighten it up a bit but I guess it was a total loss.

Still curious to what everybody here is using for knowledge management (terrible word :P) and how others transfer knowledge in their (small) software team

Yannis

@RoyT. Issue tracker & wiki.

Roy T.

I've thought about presentations and systems as Confluence/ a wiki/ a SO clone but I don't see how I can engage my teammates (or myself) enough to keep it going

We have an issue tracker of course :)

Yannis

Also, lots of barely readable post its stuck on our monitors.

Roy T.

Just afraid it will be such a new years resolution thing that fails within a month or sooner :P

Haha

we got those as well ;)

Yannis

8:01 AM

93

Q: How do you manage your knowledge base?

As programmers we have a lot of inputs: Ebooks Code snippets Interesting emails Documents Web articles Blog posts StackOverflow questions Podcasts ... Which tools do you use to store, organize, search and consult all of this stuff? Is there a silver bullet solution to handle this huge amo...

The blog idea (the first answer) is also a possibility. Could be something as simple as links to new/updated wiki articles or interesting issues resolved the past week/fortnight.

Helps keep everyone up to speed.

Duga

This may be better suited to programmers.SE, it's not really on topic here, unfortunately. — Patrick Collins 12 secs ago

Roy T.

Arent we in programmer.se?

"General Discussion for programmers.stackexchange.com Pants optional when telecommuting."

on the top right

:)

Duga

If you allow the model to have invalid (empty) properties at any point, you need to check it vor validity everytime you use it, otherwise you can't be sure if it is initialized correctly. There is a good thread over at programmers.SE on the topic: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/261585/… — fschmengler 24 secs ago

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not any of the following: * a specific programming problem, or * a software algorithm, or * software tools commonly used by programmers * a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development The closest is "software tools commonly used by programmers" -- But asking "why did they make this design decision" feel too far afield to me. . . — mgilson just now

Duga

9:00 AM

Maybe try programmers.stackexchange.com - however, I am pretty much unsure they can help you if you don't explain your problem better. — Vlasec 24 secs ago

Duga

9:30 AM

Questions that ask "where do I start" are typically too broad and are not a good fit for this site. People have their own method for approaching the problem and because of this there cannot be a correct answer. Give a good read over Where to Start, then address your post. — kayess 40 secs ago

Duga

9:42 AM

Change the title and also tags to wordpress, php, form .. then you will receive a lot of help.... This site is for professioanl programmers and not helping public do their sites. we discuss bugs errors and not do the work each others work ... however as I have established you are not a programmer and this is purely plugin based. so search plugins and forums for such plugins or ask your question again with a appropriate title and tags please. Hope this will help. — Daniel PurPur just now

Duga

11:39 AM

Stack Programmers might be able to help. — destination-data 33 secs ago

Thomas Owens

12:27 PM

I found this blog post about "software engineering vs regular engineering" the other day. When I got to the end, I don't know why the author works, but I know many places that do exactly what he said today.

user55340

1:14 PM

user55340

@Yannis I hope that SO mods look at their 'migrated away' or 'rejected' review page and consider what they doing and if they are doing anything wrong.

user55340

If they are not using that information to help guide their future actions, maybe they should start pinging again. While it may be a waste of mod time, it saves community moderation time and helps make sure that the users don't have a bad experience here for no fault of their own.

user55340

just look at the experience that Ryan had on the Java IDE question.

Thomas Owens

What Java IDE question is this?

user55340

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/306942/…

user55340

1:19 PM

(both questions easily accessible from the 10k tools - migrated > here programmers.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/here )

Thomas Owens

I was working my way there.

Do you have access to the migration stats page? Or is that a mod only page?

user55340

10k tools. I have it too.

Thomas Owens

In the last 90 days, PM is the only site with a good track record of migrating to us. 3/12 rejected from SO, 2/6 rejected from Code Review, 1/2 rejected from Server Fault, and 1/1 rejected from Workplace.

Duga

programmers.stackexchange.com is probably better site for these kind of questions. — jsalonen 10 secs ago

Yannis

@MichaelT Ryan should have done a much better job at picking a site for his question.

Thomas Owens

1:34 PM

@Yannis Why? He posted it on Stack Overflow...unless I can't read the timeline. Someone there thought it would be a good idea to migrate. It seems like it belongs on either SO or nowhere to me.

Yannis

@ThomasOwens You're right, I messed up the timeline.

Thomas Owens

@Yannis I've done that, too.

enderland

1:59 PM

@ThomasOwens I think that the interesting question there is the "fix bugs before writing more code or not" question

user55340

@ThomasOwens it wouldn't have been as bad for SO, but they did two awful ones in two days.

enderland

Many (most?) manufacturing groups have an idea of "no fault forward" -- ie you cannot move a product down a line without resolving any current issue

Thomas Owens

@enderland The idea of fixing all bugs before writing new code is dumb.

enderland

@ThomasOwens why, it's the same principle that works in manufacturing/six sigma/etc

Thomas Owens

Ideally, yes. But sometimes, a bug is so rare or so insignificant that the customer and users don't care.

@enderland There's no such idea when you apply Six Sigma to software.

Ixrec

2:01 PM

we usually try to fix bugs before writing new code; the times we don't are mostly when it's unclear whether the "bug" really is a bug, no one knows what the correct behavior is even if we all know the current behavior is wrong, or the bug is from another team and it's impossible to work around, or obviously when no one can reproduce

enderland

@ThomasOwens the problem is in the exceptions like this, what defines a bug as being too insignificant? you can't have software to the level of that article's implication if you arbitrarily decide things aren't too bad and are ok with bugs

you make enough exceptions and you end up with a hacked process

Thomas Owens

@enderland Nope. Everything goes onto the queue of work items.

Ixrec

in the no-repro case, we get to decide, in all other cases it's theoretically business/UX deciding (though in practice we decide to send the ticket to them and often we know they'll never touch it)

Thomas Owens

Bugs, enhancements, new features. Everything. It gets prioritized by whoever does the prioritization using whatever formula they have.

enderland

Thomas Owens

2:03 PM

@enderland How does your customer decide which one of two features is more important?

Apply that same criteria to bugs and features at the same time.

Ixrec

by using magic

enderland

@ThomasOwens just FYI I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate with the perspective from the article, to the extreme

Thomas Owens

@enderland But the extreme doesn't matter. What that article describes actually does happen in more critical software. I wouldn't expect Amazon or Facebook or Google to do that, except in perhaps the more extreme software bugs - things that bring down their service to unacceptable levels.

If you have defect categorization levels (minor, major, critical, for example), you can objectively define what each one is and decide to stop the process and do root cause analysis at a certain threshold.

It may not be for every single issue, but perhaps if a test cycle discovers one critical defect or some number of major defects or some level of minor defects, or assign points to each level and do it when a product has so many points against it.

enderland

I think the biggest difference between manufacturing and programming is in development, you make a single product (or many unique products) and in manufacturing you make the same product, with variations, repeatedly

Ixrec

code is design, compiling is construction

Thomas Owens

2:08 PM

@enderland In product lines, you have variations in software products.

Ixrec

I think I mostly agree with the code is design view, though I feel there's an exception or two I'm missing

Thomas Owens

@Ixrec Welcome to the club. But now, we must destroy those exceptions.

enderland

@ThomasOwens yes, but to deploy 100 exe's or 1000 is largely a trivial problem once you can make 1

Ixrec

catch(Exception e) { /* do nothing */ }

enderland

but if you are making 100 vs 1000 vs 1 high-end car, your time/effort scale

Ixrec

2:09 PM

there, destroyed

Thomas Owens

@enderland True. It do think it depends on what kind of software you're making. SaaS is different than commercial software is different than systems software.

Ixrec

to continue the analogy, I would say that the differences in your product from client to client are analogous to the distribution system for a physical product, rather than a line of products

enderland

@ThomasOwens but even SaaS is considerably different than manufacturing, which is why I personally find these "manufacturing! let's make SE like manufacturing!" analogies silly

Thomas Owens

@enderland Yes. That's my point.

enderland

product engineering/design of say the 3D model is more like SaaS -- the manufacturing side is still not

(yes manufacturing is complicated significantly by optionality but in a different way than SE is)

Thomas Owens

2:11 PM

There's different kinds of software development. Which is why people have taken Lean Manufacturing and developed Lean Software Development or Six Sigma and developed methods to apply it to software since not all of the SS tools readily apply to a software project.

Both achieve the same goals as their manufacturing counterparts, but in a way that makes sense for software.

Ixrec

2:29 PM

I don't understand what I do so wrong on this board? Every other StackOverflow board I am on doesn't drop a ton of bricks on me like this one. It is NOT CAREER and EDUCATION advice! It is technical musing and discussion with other professionals. — GPGVM 2 mins ago

we're getting a lot of these reactions lately