Slashdot Mirror
Domain: blazemonger.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to blazemonger.com.
Stories · 2
-
Getting Development Group To Adopt New Practices?
maiden_taiwan asks: "At my software company, we occasionally need all engineers to adopt a new standard or 'best practice.' Some are small, like the use of Camel Case for function names, while others have tangible business value, such as 'every check-in must be accompanied by a unit test.' As you might guess, some new practices get ignored, not because people are evil or lazy, but because they're simply too busy to pay attention and change their work habits. So we are seeking creative ways to announce, roll out, and enforce a standard for 100+ engineers so they will actually follow it." What ways have you used to convince your developers and engineers to adopt a new set of practices that may or may not get in the way of their daily work habits? We already know to automate compliance when possible (e.g., the revision control system could reject check-ins without unit tests), and simple platitudes like 'tie compliance to their year-end bonuses' aren't helpful by themselves, as someone will still need to check compliance. The engineers here are smart people, so we want to spend less time on enforcement (having architects read the code and flag any non-standard practices) and more on evangelization (getting engineers to see the benefits of the standards and -want- to follow them). I'd welcome any advice on formal processes or just plain fun ways to get people's attention." -
Single Sign-On for Integrated Open-Source Apps?
maiden_taiwan asks: "We're constructing a free groupware application by integrating well-known open source components: apache webserver, inn news server, ircd chat, scp for file transfer, etc. Unfortunately, each app has its own incompatible concept of a 'user identity.' Apache has the htpasswd module, IRC has nicknames, scp has public keys, NetNews has the poster's email address, and so forth. Has anyone managed to integrate a similar suite of apps using a single sign-on model, where a user has a single identity that is understood and carried through all these apps?"