Managing software developers can be a difficult task, especially when working with an agile team. Changing requirements and priorities combined with a learning and growing team can make even the most experienced managers sweat.

Similar complex interactions have been studied in a number of fields. Game Theory, Cybernetics, and Chaos Theory all provide inspiration to managers looking to ease communication and improve the performance of a team. These theories along with many others fall into the category of Complex Systems. But as developers we need to be careful when utilizing concepts from other domains or managing developers may become an exercise in herding cats.
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Today Architexa’s “Working With Large Codebases” blog has posted it’s 50th post. While not a huge number, we are excited to see the response to so many of our articles for helping developers work with Eclipse, with agile teams, use design patterns, and document and communicate ideas  with developer tools and diagrams.

Architexa has been working on the performance of our diagramming tools, and conducting user studies to find more about what it takes for a developer to understand code. We have also been improving our Open Source documentation site codemaps.org.

With all the articles out there helping developers understand code, we were wondering what type of information you would like to see more of?

photo credit: Imagery by Pete

We are looking forward to providing much more interesting content in the coming months. Please let us know what you would like to see. Send us your favorite articles from our site or across the web.

One of the challenges when working in teams is in keeping up with your fellow developers. Spending a lot of time reading others’ code not only means less time getting your own work done but also the gradual deterioration of the code architecture. This is a problem that we have heard over and over again from developers and managers alike.

We have just released additional code and architectural review tools that will help developers easily understand new features that are being built. We are pleased to announce that we will be demoing this functionality at EclipseCon 2011 as part of the Hot New Products Showcase. With this release we not only have a full fledged code review client and server, but also are making it really easy for developers to document the main parts of what is being worked on. Our new features will help developers create and maintain more comprehensive architectural documentation, solving a number of common development issues.

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GEF provides a great framework for building MVC based plugins on the Eclipse platform. It contains a great deal of the core functionality (described in more detail here)  necessary for building these types of apps. In addition, GEF also provides features that greatly simplify the task of creating a robust interactive editor. I’ll try to show how these different features can benefit any Eclipse developer working with GEF. read more »

When creating a rich graphical editor the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern makes life a lot easier. But it is often difficult to decide which libraries/frameworks to use. On the Eclipse platform GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) is a great solution but it can be challenging to figure out how to integrate with the parts you need. Since GEF is built on top of the Draw2d/SWT graphical libraries and is able to provide a powerful and consistent UI. However there are many considerations and pitfalls to take into account when getting started with GEF.

Some of my first large scale Java coding involved using and modifying GEF code. Luckily the GEF team provides many helpful examples showcasing the different features GEF offers. I will attempt to provide a concise introduction to the points that I found best helped me understand GEF.
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Happy new year all! With the new year comes a chance to re-invent yourself, and as a software developer I find that it is a great opportunity to reflect on how I can improve my skills in the upcoming months. I have thought about this quite a bit over the last few days and have come up with a list of new years resolutions I intend to follow that will help me, and hopefully others, start the new year off on the right foot.

Practice and experiment with new languages and frameworks for at least a day a month.
Keeping up with the latest advancements in the software world can be challenging, especially when working at a fast paced start up. Nevertheless, taking time to investigate new and interesting languages and frameworks benefits not only your career, but may also provide streamlined solutions to problems at work. Having an array of languages and frameworks in your developer’s toolkit allows you to find the best solution to a wide range of problems. Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life seems like it might be a good place to start investigating this resolution.

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Based on the great response we have had to our previous cheat sheets articles, (why they rock and tips and tricks), I have decided to post a more in depth tutorial. One of the many benefits of Cheat sheets is that they provide an immediate improvement to your product’s usability and are simple to implement. This article will allow you to quickly create multiple cheat sheets.

To help get you started we have created a cheat sheet on cheat sheets: This cheat sheet can be opened from within eclipse and will guide you through the simple steps for setting up a cheat sheet for your own project.
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When you have a lot of data, finding what you are looking for can be a challenge. Fortunately, Google and other search engines help us make sense of the vast amount of data on the web. But what about your own data? Lucene is a great tool for indexing and searching large amounts of information quickly. Fundamentally it uses a great deal of intelligence to determine which Documents are most important to you based on your query. On the surface Lucene is easy to set up and provides many useful benefits, and taking a peek under the hood can give us insight into the core of Lucene’s powerful features.

I have covered the basics of indexing and searching in Lucene. For those of you interested in the internal workings of Lucene there is no better place to start than its scoring system. Lucene’s brain is its Scoring system. This critical calculation is what determines which results are returned from your searches. Depending on the type of data you are indexing and the purpose of your application you may want to implement a custom method of scoring your data. For instance, when searching data about used cars you may want to put more weight on make and model than, say, color.

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We talked about in a previous post why Cheat Sheets Rock. Our users have found them useful in the Architexa plugin and we are in the process of adding a great deal more cheat sheets to it. We have also had requests from our readers for more details on creating and utilizing cheat sheets effectively. Some of the most important tips that we found helpful while adding cheat sheets to our product are below to help you get started.
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