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Milk at the bottom of the bowl

Posted by daniel on February 18, 2005 at 10:14 AM EST

The importance of feedback

John Mitchell tells a story that every parent can relate to in today's Weblogs . In Use less milk , his post on software estimates, he tells the story of watching his little girl pour too much milk in her cereal bowl day after day. Mine too.

While John heads toward lessons in software methodologies, he first makes the key observation:

She can see the surface of a pile of cereal in her bowl and as she pours the milk, she sees the milk run off the surface and disappear, by the time she sees the milk level come up towards the surface of the cereal, it's too late.

We shake our heads at the little girl and wonder why she doesn't learn from her experience and yet we adults aren't so quick to learn either. We sit down to a holiday meal and find we've overeaten because we ate too quickly and put too much food in our mouth before we got the feedback that we were full several servings ago. There are plenty of examples from the world of food and drink, but John steers the story in the direction of software development. After you read his post, check out our Also in Java Today story on early releases.

In other Weblogs, Kosuke Kawaguchi covers Using JAXB 2.0 to persist your own classes to XML . " One of the major enhancements in the JAXB 2.0 is an ability to bind your own hand-written classes --- often called as POJOs --- to XML. And it's very easy." Simon Brown shares his story of being " bitten by the collections framework" in Collections.unmodifiableX() .

As mentioned, another response to the two much milk syndrome is addressed in Also in Java Today . Phil Windley writes about the benefits of Running Code and Regular Releases. He argues "Any development project, but particularly those for the Web, ought to plan to release running code that someone (even just the QA group) can hit, exercise, and start to profile. The initial system might be nothing more than a loop and some placeholder presentation, but it should be there as soon as possible after the project starts. There should be a regular cycle of releases and engineers ought to be held accountable for supporting the release with working code, even if its not feature complete." The talkback adds "One-third of the variation in product quality was explained by how quickly customers were given the first beta version."

If you're not using J2SE 5.0 yet (sorry, Mac developers), you're missing out on variable-length argument lists or "varargs", which not only let you offer your callers a more flexible means of calling your code, they also enable 5.0's new C-like text formatting. You can learn more about them in Creating varargs in Java 1.5 Tiger, an excerpt from Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan's "Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook", which is presented as a 190KB PDF file, to maintain the unique style and "all lab, no lecture" approach of the Developer's Notebook series.

In Projects and Communities, the Tigase project recently released version 0.9.0 of its Jabber server software. This Java Communications Community project is meant to provide an easy to use, pre-configured, fully spec-compliant XMPP Jabber server implementation.

The Jini Community's ongoing webinar series continues next Wednesday, Feb. 23, with a presentation on "Self-Healing Distributed Applications", by R. Dale Asberry of GizmoWerkz and the judy project.

HLovatt says more about fixed and final in today's Forums. "If you use Immutables first off it is rare that you need const references just use a const interface. If you use immutables you will rarely need const references. Immutables do in practice solve many of the const aliasing problems..."

Lucretius 2 says more about the overloading compromise. "Maybe the contract should simply be that ((a << b) >> b).equals(a). Unfortunately this doesn't quite work for the normal use of << and >> for shifting. It almost works though - similar problems arise with most of the arithmetic operators, because even (a+b)-b).equals(a) doesn't quite work for ints and floats (due to overflow)."

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The importance of feedback
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