I remember the first Java project we got put on, that was amazing. It was a team of four devs. We were producing set top box software, so it was almost J2ME, highly embedded. We wrote all the code using VIM and we used Win-CVS. We just checked out the code and we checked it back in again. We resolved the mergers between us and all using the same code base; no branches, nothing funny. The simplest project imaginable. We had some really just stupid rules in that company, like every line of code should have a comment. I remember doing full Java docs for every single method I wrote and just going: it’s just so obvious, why can’t we just miss it out for this one? But we weren’t allowed to because of the company policy.
But, the whole atmosphere was fantastic. We had a great Project Manager, a great technical lead and just worked, it was really, really good.
And then I moved off that onto this feature-driven design project. It was a testing tool that we were using and they wanted to add features. But it was also being used as a Java training project, so people were rolling on, rolling off, leaving things half done, there wasn’t really an easy way to tell what was being done at any point - who was doing it, when it was going to be finished and what was going to be finished, or when we were going to release. I think it had been going for a couple of years before I got there and it’s probably still going. But, hey, it works. As training projects go it’s an interesting one.
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