SE News

With the debut of My developerWorks, two little characters (”My”) make a big difference: They take developerWorks from “just” the place where you find award-winning how-to content for developers and IT professionals to the place where you and your peers congregate to connect, share, and collaborate. Great content is just the beginning, and now it’s time for you to take the next step: Create your professional profile and your custom home page on My developerWorks. Then find and connect with like-minded peers, start tagging and bookmarking, and invite your peers into your My developerWorks network to share expertise and build groups for further interaction and collaboration.

Gretchen Moore
Ami Dewar

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/

As a customer or supplier of software services at the beginning of a Software Development Project, you know that there is too much at stake to work with just a verbal agreement. A contract is really just a set of written playing rules. The right rules increase the chance of success for both parties. The wrong rules make cooperation difficult and hinder progress. What are the available playing rules and what is the best approach for a agile project?

Peter Stevens

http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/10-agile-contracts

After a very short, five-week private beta, we’re opening Stack Overflow to the public today. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. This is a community project, so I’m being careful to avoid saying this is how it will work… that’s up to the community. But this is roughly what I have in mind.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.

Joel Spolsky

http://stackoverflow.com/

I constantly get the same question, “How do you manage a virtual team and actually get stuff done.” At Wildbit, each of the 10 team members work from home or a coworking environment. We’re spread out across four countries and many timezones. With such separation, we still manage to get a lot done and enjoy our work.

Before writing this article, I had not given much thought to exactly how we work in a virtual environment. My first answer was simply practice and many mistakes. Although, the knowledge gained from those mistakes can be narrowed down to three main ingredients: The people on the team, the process that drives the team, and clear communication.

Chris Nagele

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/building-and-managing-virtual-teams

Developing software in a team is much like playing an instrument in a band. Both require a balance of collaboration and virtuosity. Jazz defines a vision for the way products can integrate to support this kind of collaborative work, and a technology platform to deliver on this vision.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

http://www.jazz.net/