Are You a Gunslinger or a Methodologist?

IBM Systems Magazine Technical Editor Michael Ryan continues his series of articles about IBM i standards and best practices. His most recent article asks if you’re a methodologist or a gunslinger in your coding environment. He lists 12 steps of coding best practices and wants to know which steps you use in your development environment and how well you implement the steps that you use.

Michael's intent is to share the wealth of knowledge hidden inside the IBM i community and set some standards for How iT Should Be Done. I hope you'll share your thoughts and ideas on the following questions in the comments section below.

• Do you use a source control management package? Why or why not?
• Do you keep track of bugs found during development and testing?
• Do you fix bugs before writing new code, or do you continue to develop and use the best of intentions to come back and fix the code later?
• Do you have a schedule for your projects?
• Is the schedule up-to-date?
• How do you handle change to the schedule?
• Do you use written specifications?
• What process or steps do you use to create the specification?
• What’s the working environment for your developers? Office or cube? Noisy or quiet?
• What tools do you use for development? How did you justify the costs to management?
• Do you have testers, whether they’re in the IT group or not, who tests the systems as they’re being developed?
• Do you use test scripts, especially for regression testing?
• Do you have potential candidates write a code sample during an interview?
• What are your thoughts on hallway usability testing?

 

• For IBM i software vendors, are daily builds or builds in one step important considerations for you?