Chris Norton

Register Log in

Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

Organising a repository takes on several forms. The most obvious, and important, is how you organise the directory structure and name your files. Secondly, you need to make sure all the metadata used by your VCS is organised and effective. Finally, you must have some sort of process in place to ensure that these things are kept tidy and manageable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently the 3rd year SE students have been asked to give presentations of their work in front of their peers. Last week we had five teams present and this week we will have the remaining four. Overall I was quite impressed with some of the presentations and I’d like to see the rest of the teams do as well. To that end, here are the top 5 things I think you can do to make sure your presentation is well received.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I had a brief chat with a student doing 4th year software engineering at my university. He had just given a presentation on the testing methods his team was using for their web application and he said something along the lines of “we’re doing lots of manual testing because there’s no way to test web software”. Not so! Here’s a short overview of some of the software and methods you can use to increase the amount of automated testing you’re doing on your web applications.

Read the rest of this entry »

This guide is part 2 of my repository guide series. For this post I’m going to go through a basic usage of the repository that you would use for 95% of your needs. I think most students that I teach (3rd and 4th years) will already be familiar with most of these things but I’ll see if I can introduce some new stuff as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many things that is in my backlog of things to do is write up a guide for proper/advanced use of version control system repositories for 3rd year software engineering students at my university. Hopefully I might be more motivated to finish it if I create it in a series of blog posts. I’m sure others might be interested in this topic as well and, if you have any suggestions or queries, provide feedback in the comments!

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a more general reading list for software engineers than my previous book lists that covers articles, essays, blog posts and journal papers. Because I’m planning ahead, I’m calling this Part 1 and expecting more lists to come in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »