I am a JavaProgrammer in Amsterdam, TheNetherlands but I grew up in the NorthEastOfEngland. I'm also studying part-time at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam to try and satisfy my interest in ArtificialIntelligence and NaturalLanguageProcessing.
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I'm trying out iterative TestDrivenDevelopment as a way of:
	1 coping with incomplete requirements up front 
	2 introducing automated regression tests
	3 encouraging more modular design

I'm also studying DesignPatterns in the hope that they will allow me to generate better designs more quickly.
TestDrivenDesignAndPatterns is a discussion of them both by RalphJohnson.
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I used to work in manufacturing as a shop floor engineer, and part of my work involved StatisticalProcessControl. I haven't done much thinking about how techniques used in the manufacturing industry could support software engineering, but recent discussions in my regular web haunts have led me to believe that I should. More to follow I hope.

There's some discussion on this site regarding the AnalogyBetweenProgrammingAndManufacturing. As someone with direct experience of both, I would say that applications are actually quite like manufacturing processes/machines/robots: you design them, you build them, you run them (and tweak them) until no-one needs the output anymore. The programmers are the engineers - the users are the operators. So I would tend to agree with the views expressed in TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign, but I would also point out that there is more to manufacturing than merely flicking a switch. And there is more to building an executable than merely running a compiler.

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Quotes from me that people liked...

I regard it as a basic programmer's right that I should be able to,
at any time, check out all the source code and build it. (thank you SteveBerczuk)
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See also:
EinsteinPrinciple
ObjectOrientedProgramming
TestFirstDesign
UnifiedModelingLanguage
AgileModeling
RationalUnifiedProcess
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Hey Caroline - re your comment above ''I used to work in manufacturing as a shop floor engineer, and part of my work involved StatisticalProcessControl. I haven't done much thinking about how techniques used in the manufacturing industry could support software engineering, but recent discussions in my regular web haunts have led me to believe that I should. More to follow I hope.'' - you might be interested in the SixSigmaDiscussion page? Also, there is a mailing list on Six Sigma in Software Engineering - see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/6S_SWSE .
-- KarenSmiley

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