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).

Unless you work in the telecommunications industry your knowledge of how it works is likely to be quite limited, therefore it is worth describing the basics.

This article demonstrates a technique for tracking exceptions across process boundaries in distributed systems using Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs); data from log files, bug reports, and on-screen error messages can then be correlated, allowing specific errors to be pinpointed.

In my last article I set the scene for what I hope will be a series of provocative and informative articles. In the article I described the plight of Pete and his vain efforts to change development processes at his place of work.

Revision control is a critical part of any significant development project. Having secure full time access to your repository from wherever you are can be important. In some environments, such as open source projects, it's absolutely crucial to the functioning of the development team.

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.