Kevin Gabbert

TDD Programmer, working to bring a better programming methodology to the state of Oregon

kevinatkevingabbertdottcom

• Do tell! Are you working for a state agency? How are they accepting the agile methodology? (Portland is still smarting from a giant Water utility billing fiasco.) -- IanOsgood

We're having a pretty good time with it at The Oregon Dept of Fish & Wildlife. I rather like the level of professionalism it brings to the table. You no longer feel like you are "maintaining some dead project" out there. You feel as if your code "grows" with you. Having test suites are good instruction manuals for when documentation does not exist!

We develop in C#.

We have a build server that uses NAnt & CruiseControl.Net. The guy before me came in & set up a good system. I'm the new Software Architect, and I'm maintaining and improving upon this system, as well as ensuring code standards, and good application design. Research for this job is essential!

Our individual projects are created using Visual Studio, however my goal is to be able to use Monodevelop at some point as I want to remove vendor lock-in problems. At the moment, Visual Studio has a good tool set, but Monodevelop is rapidly catching up!

We use Trac/Subversion for code management/source control (For me, it knocks the socks off of VSS. No more corrupted files!). We are using Trac quite heavily. I'd estimate we've written up to a few thousand tickets (for all of our Trac projects combined) in the last 6 months. (With most of them closed!)

<My own personal view>

   Government agencies should not depend on hardware or software that is vendor-specific. A government entity "for the people" should use the best 
   of "what is free for everybody", Open Source.

   As a customer base moves on to newer products, anyone who does not migrate will suffer, as vendors are forced to charge more for legacy support. 
   Your budget will be shot trying to keep up.  

   Most definitely, if you are still using a proprietary product at that point, you are quite reactive, 
   and the viability of your company/agency will depend upon the success of a vendor. Lets hope you chose well!

</My own personal view>