Microsoft has published the results of some empirical studies about how development practices affect quality Test Driven Development improves quality by 60 to 90 percent but takes 15 to 35 percent more ‘up front’ time. The time spent is compensated by savings in maintenance time later on. Team & organization structure has a huge impact on quality. Although this is conventional wisdom the study publishes figures to prove this. The metrics used data such as how many engineers are involved in a project, how many times individual source files were modified.

Decided to take the plunge on Windows 7, as a test I’ve installed in on my wife’s netbook (Samsung NC20) and if anything it’s more responsive than under Windows XP. Next decision is whether to go the whole hog and install the 64-bit version; the machine is fairly new, a Dell Precision 690, and I like the idea of having >4Gb of RAM for some of the projects I’m working on when I might have three copies of VS 2008 open at the same time.

Just recovering from flu at the moment and I’m an official Swine Flu statistic. Not the nicest of bugs, couldn’t keep any food down until the anti-virals kicked in but the funniest thing about the whole episode is the screening questionnaire to see if you qualify for the Tamiflu. First question is whether you are enquiring on behalf of yourself or someone else, on being told I that I was asking for myself the call centre staff (apologetically) asked

I try to keep the same project structure for all projects, this makes it easy when initiating new projects as you can automate the creation of the core project structure. We have the usual subversion branches/tags/trunk structure and then within trunk we have builds : Contains all continous integration build files for the project. code : All the code for the project, flat directory structure internally with one project per directory.

Finally had sometime to progress the port of Hibernate Search… We are intending to be feature complete with Hibernate Search 3.0.1 GA and at the moment I would say that we have ported about 80% of the code. I have also updated the libraries so that we are using Lucene 2.3.1 and NHibernate 2.1