Managing large projects

Posted by Gregg Kellogg Tue, 31 Oct 2006 20:10:00 GMT

Of paramount concern in managing large development efforts is the need to ensure that the application remains relevant and maintainable and can be kept up-to-date with the requirements of the rest of the organization.

The danger of a long running project managed by a limited pool of developers is that the original requirements and goals of the system can be lost in the face of multiple enhancements. This can lead to a system that is arcane, does not reflect the actual needs of the department, and (most importantly) is over-reliant on the internal knowledge of the development team. This poses a substantial risk to the business that relies on the system for day-to-day operation.

Fortunately there is a long standing body of Industry Best Practices that have been used to successfully manage the lifecycle of large-scoped projects.

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Button Labels

Posted by Gregg Kellogg Tue, 24 Oct 2006 02:22:00 GMT

I checked in the button-labels plugin. I was frustrated when trying to create a form with multiple radio-buttons and no way to tell them apart. Basically, if the :label option is passed to radio_button, it calls content_tag() instead of tag() and uses the label as the content. 

radio_button("post", "title", "Goodbye World", :label => "Goodby World")

<input id="post_title_goodbye_world" 
     name="post[title]" 
     type="radio" 
     value="Goodbye World">
  <label for="post_title_goodbye_world>
    Goodby World
  </label>
</input>

The plugin is managed on ruby_forge. Rdoc is available.

Entered some time ago as a bug #4627.

Gregg Kellogg

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