I was asked by one of my clients to give a short introduction into Agile. As we did not have an appropriate presentation for this kind of audience and knowledge level I decided to create a new presentation. And while I was thinking of a good metaphor to compare traditional waterfall against agile methodologies the pictures of my recent snowboarding trip caught my eye and it hit me; Skiing (or snowboarding) is a very good metaphor to compare both methodologies.

It has the same characteristics as a project in that once you get started it just keeps on going; There are other projects (or skiers) in your way, environments change and conditions might not be what you expected them to be.

Let's see how it works out:
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Filed under Agile, Scrum | 1 Comment »

Previous time I blogged about the last step of the seven steps, step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain, a non-technical but rather a communication and behavior thing which I found crucial for success. We now have reached the end of this series and I'll sum up the topics we've dealt with and draw some conclusions. (more...)

Filed under Architecture, Java, Monitoring, Performance, Process, Quality Assurance, Requirements Management, Testing, Tools | No Comments »

We as Agilists are extremely result driven: delivering value to the customer as soon as possible is the axle around which our work and vision revolve. This can help us but also hamper us in the process of bringing Agile to a non-Agile environment. Being aware of this may already help us be more effective in bringing about changes in an effective way. The question “is this a quick-change or a slow-change organization” should be an explicit part of your analysis. Be patient!

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Tags: Agile, coaching, patience, slow change
Filed under Java | 2 Comments »

Recently, I put together a Spring demonstration for jclouds, the Java cloud library. This quickly turned into unexpected multi-dimensional experiment in integrating Guice, Google App Engine and Spring, but after much trial-and-error I finally came across a configuration that does the trick - or at least works¹ as well as seems possible on GAE. (more...)

Tags: GAE, Google App Engine, Guice, Javaconfig, jclouds, Spring
Filed under Amazon Webservices, Frameworks, Java, Spring | 4 Comments »

Last year, before the Christmas holidays , I described how we do middleware integration testing at XebiaLabs and I described the way we deploy test servlets by wrapping them in WAR and EAR files that get generated on the fly. There is only one thing left to explain; how do we integrate these tests into a continuous build using Maven and VMware?

Running the middleware integration tests

So let's start with the Maven configuration. As I mentioned in the first blog of this series, the integration tests are recognizable by the fact that the classnames end in Itest. That means they won't get picked up by the default configuration of the Maven Surefire plugin. And that is fortunate because we don't always want to run these tests. Firstly they require a very specific test setup (the application server configurations should be in an expected state, see below) and secondly they can take a long time to complete and that would get in the way of the quick turnaround we want from commit builds in our continuous integration system.
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Filed under Deployment, JBoss, Java, Maven, Middleware, TDD, Testing, Virtualization, Xebia Labs | 2 Comments »