> I'm familiar with Emerson's quote, but I think the keyword> here is "foolish". Consistency, in itself, is not a bad> thing, and can be very useful, such as not having to learn> to drive a car, any time you're going to drive a new car,> and can instead focus on more interesting things.Consistency across a codebase isn't a bad thing at all, in...

> > CruiseControl* should run CheckStyle. The build should> > fail if CheckStyle fails.> > > > *or your favorite Continuous Integration server.> > I'd be curious how many people actually do this, though.> Yes, it would surely enforce coding style, but at the> expense of inflating the integration server's red flag.We do it where I am at the...

I think style enforcing is easily taken too far has has been by checkstyle files I've seen in neighboring companies as well as the one I'm at currently.Enforcing things like a consistent indentation, forcing brackets on a single line if statement is just fine by me as it's maintaining the readability of the code across a project or even across...

Martin Fowler IMHO is a really clever bloke, I don't agree with everything he says but he at least backs his ideas with logical thoughts and reasons rather than a religious or emotional statement about how things feel and what he likes/dislikes. I'll go so far as to say there IS a lot of hype surrounding agile/xp/tdd practices with many people...

Well looking at that example the first thing that jumped out at me is each email has a photo of the sender next to it which i think is a great idea. Not because anyone good looking ever emails me but because (in business especially) this would greatly help put a face to a name and remember who is who in large organisations, to help you remember...

Apologies for being slightly off topic here but I want to get out of the situation of being the "guy who knows everything about XXX project" as Chad spoke about here in question 1. I want to do this in an agile way though not by writing a truckload of documentation describing the tech aspects of the system, the direction i want to go with it,...

If you're writing the tool for the masses then I agree with the approach you took. If however this tool is only for internal use within a company I have used this kind of situation as an excuse to upgrade projects to use Java 5. This can help convince management to allocate time for an upgrade so the tool can be used across different projects...

> Dag Blakstad wrote How can you prove that nothing was> broken during refactoring without tests?> By proof :-) (Tests don't prove.)I would argue that "proof" in the purest form doesn't exist in software development. I bet the developer "proved" his code worked before shipping the product in the first instance yet this bug was still found...

IMHO the original comparison with an electrical component in a box is flawed logic in any case.A box front panel should be likened to a UI layer not an Interface, the backside of the panel with wires is the UI linking to interfaces, the circuitry is the implementation of those interfaces.I agree that the implementation of such interfaces can...