Doc On Dev: Code as a Cause of Project Failure. The original question During the speaker panel at SCNA this past weekend, Chad Fowler (@chadfowler) asked, "How many projects fail because of the code? ". Given the context, I assumed he was making the point that projects fail due to business issues, not code. The room was silent. While one might have assumed this meant the entire group thought it rhetorical, I concluded everyone agreed with Chad. The follow-up Uncle Bob (@unclebobmartin) later did a quick twitter survey, which I and many others took part in. Cause versus Responsibility Smoking Guns A man lays dead; a single bullet wound in his chest. Yes, technically, the project failed due to code. Trigger Men Our tragedies do not end there.
Somebody pulled the trigger. In large projects, identifying one guilty party is commonly impossible not to mention grossly naive. On a software project, code is critical. But don't forget it is we who write the code. It is we who pull the trigger. Programmer Competency Matrix | My DebugBar | IETester / HomePage. IETester is free.To support the projectyou can make a donation : or you can translate it. IETester is a free (both for personal and professional usage) WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE11, IE10, IE9, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 8 desktop, Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
This is an alpha release, so feel free to post comments/bugs on the IETester forum. Requirement : Windows 8 desktop, Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP with IE7 minimum (Windows XP/IE6 config has some problems and IE8 instance do not work under XP without IE7) Note for IE10 : IE10 is not available on IETester if it is not the default IE version installed on the system. So IE10 is only available on Windows 8 machines. (IETester v0.5.4 zipped installer for people unable to download .exe files due to proxy limitations)(You can download previous versions from the ChangeLog page) Known problems and limitations : External ressources :
Web Accessibility in Mind. Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement - Accessites.org. Graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are two sides of the same coin. Both are — in this context — applied to make a web site accessible to any user agent, while providing improved aesthetics and/or usability for more capable browsers. The difference between the two is where you begin your approach. Some time ago I wrote an article here about two very different approaches to web design: Visual Vs. Structural. The concepts of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement relate closely to those two approaches. Graceful Degradation Graceful degradation is the older of the two concepts. The premise for graceful degradation is to first build for the latest and greatest, then add handlers for less capable devices.
A familiar example of graceful degradation is the alt attribute for images. Using layout tables may be seen as one form of graceful degradation: if the CSS styling cannot be applied — e.g., in really old browsers — at least the basic page layout is retained.