In the last issue of C Vu we started a journey into the world of software development teamwork. We looked at team structure, personal skills for good teamwork, at team working tools, and team organisation. Phew! That's quite a lot of stuff to take in, but I guess after two months you've finally digested it all, and are now back ready for more.

In my last article I discussed the values in the Agile Manifesto and what they mean to mean. There are many practices that can be used to make yourself more agile. Short iterations, the planning game, pair programming, and refactoring are a few of the practices present in eXtreme programming. The practice of most value to me, and the practice that many recommend to use as a starting point, is Test Driven Development - TDD.

The computer science community has shown a woeful lack of interest in debugging, which given the huge economic cost of debugging is somewhat mysterious. However, there may be signs of "green shoots" in the desert landscape of debugging tools.

Recently, I had the chance to interview Christof Wittig, CEO of db4objects (www.db4o.com).

To summarize, as memory goes too low, garbage collection could kick in, but it in turn needs memory to maintain a traversal stack … Quite a catch-22.

Before I start, this is going to be fun. Understand? Fun. Not dull, but fun. I intend writing this in a banana suit with my feet in a bucket of warm rice pudding[1]. That's how much fun it's going to be!