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What do QA testing and NFL football have in common? They both involve developers.
June 30, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/developer-diaries/189500004
Steve Hutton
Employer: Factor 5
Job: Senior Software Engineer
DDJ: Steve, where do you work?
SH: Factor 5 is a video game company that's currently developing next-generation video games for the PlayStation 3. I work on in-house tools that all the employees use to build the games. In particular, I work on something called the "resource manager tool," which we use to manage and catalog all the data which goes into the games.
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
SH: I like the fact that my work is a mix of service-style database programming and also GUI programming. I also like writing tools for the in-house users because of the rapid feedback. And it's also fun to see the progress in the games themselves as they get better and better each week. It's very exciting to see that and it keeps you motivated.
DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?
SH: Working on the next-generation games means the technology we're using changes pretty quickly. We have to keep the tools working as the game engine continues to evolve, and also we have to respond to feature requests from game designers, so it's kind of a balancing act.
DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier?
SH: One of the things I really like about this company is that there's the culture of technical excellence. The owners of the company are highly technical—they're in the office everyday writing code. So when something challenging comes up, it doesn't take long for everyone to understand the impact of the situation at the highest level. Challenges don't block us for very long.
Alex Grosholz
Employer: The Miami Dolphins
Job: Lead application developer
DDJ: Alex, what do you do as lead application developer for an NFL team?
AG: I kind of oversee all our internal applications. Like we have a scouting system, so we investigate players on the field, but we also need to know all their statistical backgrounds—pretty much anything you can think of [about] a player to try and give us a competitive advantage.
DDJ: How many developers work for the Dolphins?
AG: We have a small development team—three to four onsite developers.
DDJ: What kind of tools do you use? Are you Windows-based?
AG: Yeah, we are a Microsoft shop, so we have Visual Studio and all that. Everybody seems to have their prejudices when it comes to development tools and environments, but I think [you should use] the tool that you feel comfortable with to get the job done. I personally actually really like ColdFusion. It's easy to program. If you need to bring somebody in, they can pick it up right away.
DDJ: What's hard about your job?
AG: I always hear developers say that they're under tight deadlines, but most developers have deadlines that, you know, you can always kind of push them off. But we have a draft day. I have to make sure those systems are up ready and make us able to make our decisions on point, right at a certain time, right at a certain date. It makes our jobs a little more difficult.
Michael Hunter
Employer: Microsoft
Job: Technical Lead
DDJ: What does "Technical Lead" mean?
MH: A couple of things. The first is that I figure out how to do what needs to be done—looking at things like the test infrastructure, as well as how well we do the testing that we need to do.
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
MH: Well, I get to test all day, which is great. You know, making things blow up is always fun.
DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?
MH: Thinking about how best to test things. I work on Microsoft Expression, which is a suite of designer tools. And it's not like some API [where] you just write a bunch of little programs to bang on those APIs. We're doing stuff on the screen, so we have to figure out how to automate all those user actions in a way that is sustainable and easy to maintain, and faster than just doing all that testing manually. That's been a challenge.
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