Hi Sean, Aside from some things we have talked about f2f, the following two books by Steve McConnell about project managment in software help alot:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=1556159005&vm= http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=1572316217&vm= Yes microsoft press, but they are very good. Of course nothing can replace experience, but you can avoid classic mistakes and these books cover them well. Jim Freeman Sean Quinlan wrote: > > [forwarded submission from a non-member address -- rjk] > > From: Sean Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 20:43:52 -0500 > Subject: maintenance of large perl code bases > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I had hoped to bring up this question at tomorrows meeting, but Wednesday's > are hard, and tomorrow looks impossible. So maybe someone can toss this up > for discussion, and hopefully let the list know the key points. > > I know there are sights out there, such as Boston.com it appears, and I've > heard about some large financial institutions, that rely on substantial > amounts of Perl code. Obviously for a successful business, having that code > be maintainable is (or should be!) of significant importance. But I > regularly hear complaints, largely from non-Perl (or Perl primary anyway) > people from other industries coming into bioinformatics, about these large, > unmaintainable Perl code bases. > > Now, in my experience, I have to admit this is largely more true than not. > Usually because most of the software was written by people who were > biologists/engineers/physicists/whatever first, and programmers (sometimes > distant) second, often without thought or concern of it's long term > usability. So I've heard of a few places now moving away from Perl, > frequently apparently forcing a large ground up recode in some other > (usually in Java, and I've heard some interesting 'rumors' as to why) > language. > > I see little point in arguing with this from the standpoint of simply Perl > first. I know others better than I have done talks and presentations on > writing maintainable Perl code, and probably on the problems with porting > old code to a more maintainable format. I want to steal from those people > ... blatantly (with credits of course). > > What I would like to do is to collaborate with a few people who have: > 1) Done presentations related to the subject of code maintenance (and a > little QA thrown in might be good). > > 2) Have been involved with or responsible for large installations of Perl > code that was well maintained. > > 3) Others involved with bioinformatics interested in or having experience > with this problem. > > What I would like to and up with are sources for presentations (preferably > a couple already canned of varied lengths) on the subject of maintaining > large Perl code bases written specifically as it applies to bioinformatics. > If you don't want/have time to collaborate, but have pointers to good > sources of information/inspiration, please also pipe up. > > Thanks everyone!!! > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Sean P. Quinlan > http://people.ne.mediaone.net/squinlan/index.html > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of > conversation" - Plato
