Jared Richardson04/28/10
8743 views
2 replies

Better Code on a Budget and Training for Free

There are many ways to improve your code. Some are cheap, others expensive. There are tools, processes, conferences, and metrics. There are so many different ways that we're told how to write better code. We're told in books, at conferences, in classes, and...

Eric Hagan04/27/10
3592 views
0 replies

Continuous Integration and the "Cup of Coffee" Test

Paul Julius is an independent consultant who has recently worked with many companies to implement continuous integration at the enterprise level. He also has...

Gunnar Peipman04/27/10
4324 views
1 replies

Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer – Book Review

Agile development expects mind shift and developers are not the only ones who must be agile. Every chain is as strong as it’s weakest link and same goes also for development teams. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software...

Jared Richardson04/27/10
2498 views
1 replies

Lean: Stop Drinking the Kool Aid!

Jeff Anderson wrote up his impressions from the extremely successful Lean Software and Systems Conference 2010. Jeff had a pretty good writeup and provides a bit of insight to the conference.It's a brief, but pretty good, writeup. He does more than just cite...

Steven Lott04/27/10
4043 views
1 replies

Yet More Praise for Unit Tests

I can't say enough good things about TDD. But I'll try.Due to an epic failure to read the documentation (this, specifically) I couldn't get our RESTful web services to work in Apache.

Mike Cottmeyer04/27/10
1717 views
0 replies

Vanilla Scrum and Multi-Team Value Streams

Okay... so what if my value stream isn't encapsulated within a single Scrum team? What do I do then? To some degree, I think it depends on how much of the value stream is outside the team. If external dependencies are the exception rather than the...

Jared Richardson04/26/10
1421 views
0 replies

What Does It Mean to Be Agile?

Dr. Williams has been involved with studying and promoting Agile practices for many years. She's once again asking for the community to pitch in and let her know where things stand.Please take a moment and contribute to the survey!

Jared Richardson04/26/10
8452 views
3 replies

Code and Coffee: Save Yourself!

Code and Coffee is a simple idea. Once a week, get together in the morning, grab a shot of caffeine, and write some code. Pair with an old friend or a new one, but come willing to learn.

Eric Hagan04/26/10
3541 views
0 replies

The Importance of Regression Testing

JoEllen West says that development shops must conduct thorough regression testing to mitigate the instances where a change to the codebase breaks a feature in...

Eric Hagan04/26/10
6887 views
0 replies

Moving to Test-Driven Development and Exploring Language Paradigms

Michael Feathers defines legacy code as "code without tests." There's a major qualitative difference when working on code without tests. ...

Mike Cottmeyer04/26/10
1248 views
0 replies

Will Vanilla Scrum Work for You?

In the midst of all the methodology wrangling... I've always felt that there is a time and a place for Vanilla Scrum. The problem is that most of the time, folks are giving vanilla Scrum a try when Vanilla Scrum just isn't a very good fit for their...

Debasish Ghosh04/26/10
6598 views
1 replies

DSL Interoperability and Language Cacophony

Many times I hear people say that DSL based development often leads to a situation where you have to manage a mix of code written in various languages, which are barely interoperable and often need to be integrated using glues like ScriptEngine that makes...

Julian Simpson04/23/10
5608 views
4 replies

Separation of concerns in Ant

There’s nothing wrong with Ant. No, really! True, there’s some nasty Ant files out there. Perhaps that’s because we often treat our build as a second class citizen. How do you keep your build files from becoming bloated and hard to maintain? ...

Mitch Pronschinske04/22/10
9241 views
0 replies

Study on the State of Code Review

A comprehensive survey was recently conducted to to see how organizations today are conducting code reviews, and what challenges they commonly face. The Forrester study, commissioned by Klocwork, looks at the key benefits of code review, the tools that...

Mitch Pronschinske04/22/10
13991 views
0 replies

IntelliJ and TeamCity Load Up on New Features

This week JetBrains unleashed two version updates for its flagship development tools. The releases included IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2, JetBrains' IDE platform, and Team City 5.1, their continuous integration and build server. IntelliJ features Groovy, GWT, and...