Here at Inetium, we're doing SCRUM now for our big project. What isSCRUM? SCRUM is an agile technique forsoftware development. Similar to any other eXtremem programming paradigm that replacesRUP and the traditional waterfall processes. Every day you have SCRUM meetings where the members ofyour team get together to discuss what you completed yesterday and what you're completingtoday. All in reference to your iteration...
With that said, we had our daily SCRUM meeting and came back to mycorner of our Cubehood, to show off a product that I have been playing with, calledResharper by JetBrains ... I guess you could call thisa mini-review.. sorta like what Avonelledoes at CoolBits - Soon I will geta standard look and feel for reviews, cause I'll review software,music,and movies from timeto time.
First, this tool DOES do lots of interesting things... such as offering refactoringcapabilities, better code reference and meta data (where is this class used?), and moreintelligent code intellisense... BUT, when you add this functionality onto all of theother cool add-ins or even the IDE, you get clutter (See picture below).
When I went through school, I used Vi to do ALL of my code editing and a separateconsole for compiling and testing... in our classes where we used Ada and Java.. I usedpcGrasp which is now jGrasp as an IDE.. it was extremely basic and really helpedme learn.
But this tool.. though adds lots of efficient help, really hinders a developer tothink about his code. It's one thing to make a developer more efficient, but it's anotherto make the developer dumb (as my coworker Justin would say). Aside from that, based onpure functionality the tool does what it says it does, and it does it damn well.
Tool: Resharper 1.0.3
Developer: Jet Brains - http://www.jetbrains.com
Price: Free 30 Day Trial - $99 per seat
Pros:
- Lots of features that Visual Studio .Net 2003 does not include by default (but willcome with Whidbey)
- It's nice to see exactly what your code is doing and what you can improve simply onone-pass processing.
Cons:
- Too many colors, icons, and IDE (code) clutter when you use the tool.
- Lots of meta-data needs to be created - scares you when you first open a solutionthat hasn't been processed, makes you think you're code is being altered..“I felt violated“
- Project has to be initialized with the tool when its opened EVERY TIME. When you havea solution with 10 HUGE projects like we do for my project, it gets to be timeconsuming.
Example of code clutter by the IDE:
I took this screen shot with a wonderful tool called Cropper by Brian Scott