The instructions on the Google site for setting up for Android development within Eclipse on Windows is pretty good. However, there are a few things to watch out for (as of today, July 23, 2010):
I’ve long been a fan of agile software development as crystallized in the Agile Manifesto. However, I’ve also felt like the core tenants laid out there are too vague to help software organizations actually be successful. I’ve recently learned of (and signed) the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. It is still short on details of how to do it (as I guess any document of this nature must be), but I think it is a nice raising of the bar of the original manifesto:
As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:
Not only working software, but also well-crafted software
Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value
Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships
That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.
© 2009, the undersigned. this statement may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice.
Bob Martin does a great job expanding on it in this Software Engineering Radio interview.
Software Architecture is largely a matter of communication. One big area of communications is documenting a library, whether for internal or external consumption. It is well-known that written documentation goes out of date the minute you publish it.
The only hope of keeping the documentation up-to-date is to have the it embedded within source code it is illuminating. This allows you to update the doc as you update the code. The Javadoc and C# XML comments are good for this, but don’t give you a good way to provide anything beyond documentation of classes and methods, which often falls short in properly documenting a library or code base.
Doxygen is a capable, open source library that combines the comment-based documentation with a full mark-up language that allows you to add text, diagrams, pages, sections, lists, etc. that allows for robust documentation.
Some of my favorite features include: