Design Patterns

What is a design pattern?

Design pattern is a workaround that we use to compensate for a deficiency of a programming language.

Projector effect

When you are in a Scrum planning session or any other kind of Scrum event or at a meeting, look closely how people behave when there is a computer screen projected on the wall.

What happens most of time is this:

• nobody looks at others,
• everybody look at the projected screen (or a monitor, if there is no projector),
• people stare at the slides even though they have already read them 5 times,
• and worst of all: people tend to turn off their regular intellectual abilities and day-dream to the subtle noise of projector's fan

If you do use computer at the meetings, specifically during Scrum events, try out this advice and stop using it. Even for a couple of meetings. I am sure you will see the difference.

The mere fact that product development is going to be done on computers and that the product will run on a computer doesn't mean that every aspect of our work must be done with a computer.

Real-time shared editing of code in Eclipse

I came across this great video by Mustafa K. Isik.

http://vimeo.com/1195398

This was recorded a couple of years ago and I'm hoping the whole idea had developed since then.

Anyway, I searched for an Eclipse plugin that supports shared editing and I quickly learned about ECF:

http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/

However, despite well documented installation, I found no help there whatsoever to start actually using the plugin. Spending some more time trying to find this information resulted in this excellent how-to article:

http://realsearchgroup.org/SEMaterials/tutorials/docshare/docshare.htm

I really recommend seeing the video in the first link, if you haven't done so yet. And then, actually giving it a try!