Blogs:JaroslavTulach:Daily Life:ManagingDependencies

From APIDesign

I have always known that managing dependencies is an interesting topic. Thus I was glad to reply to Craig Marshall's questions asked on Dec 9, 2009:

I would be interested to hear peoples experience around procedures for
managing and communicating changes around module dependencies, either in
the Netbeans RCP / IDE development itself or other projects sitting on
top of it.
What do people find works well between teams in a distributed
environment (Documentation, Diagrams, Wiki's, Meetings)?

Nice question, why not do shameless self promotion plug (if you don't commend yourself, who's going to?) and offer TheAPIBook? Thus I provided short answer: The important thing is to prevent unwanted changes. For that we have sigtest and golden files. Then we have the API review process to agree and approve intended changes. I have written a book (also) about this process.

Enough I thought. Self promotion stinks. But you would not believe what happened after that. Tom Wheeler sent a reply going even further:

I cannot recommend Jaroslav's API Design book enough for a very
thorough coverage of these topics.  IMHO, it's not just applicable to
NetBeans Platform or even Java developers -- this is essential reading
for anyone who wants to learn how to design robust APIs upon which
others can rely.

The only thing I will add is that in addition to the resources he
mentioned, you should also note that NetBeans' javadoc contains a list
of all API changes between any release and its predecessor.  You can
see an example of this by following the "Changes since previous
release" link on the main content frame here:

   http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/

Perfect and that was not the end. Fabrizio Giudici added his:

+1

Thanks you guys and for everyone else: It is the gift time, make your friends blessed by giving them a copy of the Practical API Desing book.