Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Defy all
Challenges.
Microsoft®
Visual Studio
2008
Testing Tools to
Support Agile
Software Delivery
Whitepaper
Terracotta:
Scale your
Apps w/ease
Offload the DB:
Learn More!
Posted by Jonathan Allen on Jul 11, 2007 02:03 AM
Rob Weir has called the spreadsheet formulas into question. Lost in the posturing and grandstanding are some serious holes in the specification.
The first example is the SIN function:
Description: Computes the sine of x.
Notice there is no mention of what units the parameter x expects. While you can figure out that it expect radians from the examples, it is never explicitly stated.
The next mistake cited by Rob Weir is quite amusing.
The AVEDEV function (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.17) should return the average deviation of a list of values. However, the formula given for this function is actually for calculating the number of combinations of n things taken k at a time. Nice formula, though. Jakob Bernoulli would be proud. But anyone using an OOXML spreadsheet application based on this standard will be perplexed at the values returned by their AVEDEV function. Did these formulas get any expert review in Ecma?
Internationalization also raises questions.
The CONVERT function (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.48) converts from one unit to another. Some conversions explicitly allowed include liquid measure conversions such as from liters to cups or tablespoons. But whose cup and whose tablespoon? Traditional liquid measures vary from country to country. In the US, a cup is 8oz, except for FDA labeling purposes when a cup is 240ml. But in Australia a cup is 250ml and in the UK it is 285ml. Similarly a tablespoon has various definitions. OOXML is silent on what assumptions an application should make. I guess I won't be using OOXML to store my recipes, and certainly not to calculate medical doses!
Rob Weir lists several more problems with the OpenXML spec in his blog An Antic Disposition.
Lean Software Development Governance, a whitepaper by Per Kroll and Scott Ambler
Webcast: Applying lean thinking to the governance of software development
Gaining Control of Changing Requirements Webcast
The Future of Software Delivery According to visionaries Grady Booch & Erich Gamma
The Agile Business Analyst: Skills and Techniques needed for Agile
Aptana RadRails: An IDE for Rails Development by Javier Ramírez discusses the latest Aptana RadRails IDE, a development environment for creating Ruby on Rails applications.
Cliff Click discusses how to optimize generated bytecode for running on the JVM. Click analyzes and reports on several JVM languages and shows several places where they could increase performance.
Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, speaks on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.
Dave Nicolette and Karl Scotland try to introduce non-technical managers to one of the most popular Agile development techniques: Test-Driven Development (TDD).
Smooks is best known for its transformation capabilities, but in this article Tom Fennelly describes how you can also use it for structured event streaming.
Successful architectures evolve over time to meet changing business requirements. Luke Hohmann presents how to collaborate with key members of your business to manage architectural changes.
In this article, Dr. Tobias Komischke explains how colors used in a GUI can influence our interaction with a computer and offers advice on using the appropriate colors for the interface.
In his presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco, MuleSource architect Dan Diephouse explores ways to use the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) when building services in a RESTful way.
1 comment
Reply