Six Revisions has Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep. IMHO, the most important tip is to  just plain accept the fact that feature creep is going to happen, and work some time into the schedule for it. Flat out rejecting all of the customers requests after the requirements document has been drawn up is a sure-fire way to loose a customer. It is much better to put a fudge-factor into your delivery estimates so that when things come up, you know you’ll have some time to handle them.

One of my favorite features of Groovy is the safe navigation operator. As a Java developer by day (heroic blogger by night?), I spend a good amount of time fixing bugs revolving around null pointer exceptions. With Groovy, the ? operator saves you from constantly having to check for null. Andrew Glover has a good example of Defensive Programming with Groovy over at The Disco Blog today.

James Golick has an interesting post on his blog entitled “The Crunch Mode Paradox“. The basic premise is that during crunch time, even though your developers are putting in more hours, productivity decreases and the chance of introducing bugs increases dramatically. Any developer who has had to pull a few all nighters before a release date knows that the code written in those wee hours of the night isn’t exactly the cleanest.

This is one you’ll want to send to your manager!