Last time I blogged about the importance of continuous performance testing. When you write and run performance tests continuously, just like unit tests, you get early performance insights in new and changed features of your software. This will minimize surprises and be more productive. Now I’ll blog about monitoring and diagnostics.

When a new version of the software is released into the production environment, the question always is: will it actually perform like we saw in testing and acceptance environments? And we keep our fingers crossed.
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Tags: JAMon, JARep, Monitoring, Performance
Filed under Java, Monitoring, Opensource, Performance, Tools | 6 Comments »

The ordinal of an Enum is used together with JPA to set the database value of an Enum type field of an entity. Since i find the use of the ordinal dangerous in case of future changes i was searching for an alternative way of populating my database field while still using the Enum in my application code.
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Filed under Eclipse, JPA, Java | 2 Comments »

For my current project we use Kettle to process data from a number of sources and store it in a shared database. Kettle has great support for parsing data from a variety of sources, transforming it and writing it to a variety of destinations. One problem that often arises when inserting data in a relational database is the need for a syntactic, unique key that will be generated when a new row is inserted and later in the process used for other rows that refer the primary row. There are many solutions for this problem, both in the RDBMS and in the Java space. This blog reports on a search through several code bases to come up with a good solution in kettle which, unfortunately, still evades me.
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Tags: generated keys, Hibernate, hsqldb, kettle, postgresql
Filed under kettle | 2 Comments »

I joined Xebia India as a tester for one of the project. While validating the defects the biggest problem that I faced was regarding the understanding of defect report and trying to reproduce the said problem when there were no steps. Being a new member to the team and joining the application in between the sprints added to it. Every time when I had to validate the defect and steps to reproduce were not there I had to run to the developer for their help. Developers too were tied up with their own tight schedules and sometimes the validation for the defect had to wait for sometime which created a backlog for me and then I thought to come up with the solution to it which I am discussing below. Using the following approach helped us and can help all.
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Filed under Architecture, Testing | 2 Comments »

Last week, after one of our bi-weekly Xebia Knowledge Exchange meetings when we should have been having a beer chatting about cars and sport, a few fellow Xebians and I were having a beer chatting about agile vs waterfall. The conversation quickly turned to the question "what is the worst part about waterfall."

In the end we settled on "Incentivizing (is that a word?) parts of the chain instead of the whole".

Let me explain.
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Filed under Java | 1 Comment »

After being away from the GIS world for a while, I started working on a new project replacing the current used software by an open source alternative. The first small application that needed to be made was for an emergency phone call center to show the position of the caller on a map. After that a few prototypes should prove that it was doable to replace the current software stack by open source alternatives.

In this blog I will describe the tools used, a few of the problems I ran into and of course the solutions to the problems which involve coding and communication

The tools used where a Java based server called Geoserver and a client side JavaScript library called OpenLayers.

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Filed under Ajax, GIS, Java, Javascript, Opensource, Oracle | 1 Comment »

Agile2009 is the yearly conference of the Agile Alliance. This year we are in the windy city, Chicago. With over 1350 participants, 300 presentations and over 1500 initial submissions, this conference really is the cream of the crop on Agile software development.

This year I had the honor of presenting a case study on Fully Distributed Scrum together with Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum.

We presented about a Xebia client located in San Francisco working with our office in new Delhi using a single hyperproductive distributed Scrum team! Thats right, hardcore Agile results across all timezones, culture, language etc.
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Filed under Agile, distributed agile, offshore | 1 Comment »

Last week I ran into a problem while testing AjaxBehavior in Wicket.

Consider the following scenario: we have a FormComponent which has an AjaxBehavior added to it. We want to test that behavior. Depending on the selected value of for instance a RadioChoice, the Ajaxbehavior should show one component and hide another.

You would think that this would be out of the box behavior when using WicketTester, but unfortunately this is not the case. Triggering an Ajaxbehavior is easy using WicketTester, but setting the selected value isn't. (more...)

Filed under Ajax, Java, Testing, Wicket | 1 Comment »

My colleague Robert van Loghem and I have been blogging about Java EE deployment the last few weeks. And that is not without a reason; we have built Deployit, a product to automate Java EE deployments. We've already mentioned it before in some of our podcasts and blogs, so now might be a good time to explain some of the concepts behind our product.

The problem

The problem our product is addressing is that Java EE deployments are tedious and unpredictable affairs that can also be very dependent on specific knowledge. The guys at ZeroTurnaround conducted a survey on Java EE redeployment and restart times. The results are interesting, especially when you consider that these times are for a redeployment in a development environment. Consider the challenges of doing this in a production environment with an application server cluster, multiple web servers, and databases and so forth that all need to be configured and restarted using a full redeployment scenario. I believe that the only way to do deploy applicaitons in a reliable and efficient manner is to automate this task. Something that IT analysts such as Gartner and Forrester also see as an emerging and hot topic.
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Filed under Deployment, Middleware, Xebia Labs | No Comments »

Over and over again, the documentation discussion flares up before, during and after projects. What documentation should we make? Why do we need design documents? How can we be sure the correct software is being build if we don't have a complete Functional Design Document. If the Functional design document isn't in line with the actual software being build, how can we check whether we got what we paid for? etc. etc. etc. (more...)

Tags: Agile, document, documentation
Filed under Agile, General | 2 Comments »