Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: January 31st, 2010
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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Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: January 20th, 2010
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…)
Posted by Luuk Dijkhuis around lunchtime: January 20th, 2010
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!
Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: January 17th, 2010
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…)
Posted by Wilfred Springer at around evening time: January 11th, 2010
There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to validate an XML document against a schema, so I figured I would roll my own library for it. Now, with that library, validating against a schema all of a sudden becomes easy. In the past, I hardly ever considered validating a document against a schema in my tests, but now I find myself doing it all over the place.
Anyway, I will just give a brief introduction. (And there really isn’t that much to talk about.)
First of all, let’s assume that you have a File reference to an XML file (xml) and a File reference to a RelaxNG schema file (schema) (more…)
Posted by Vincent Partington in the wee hours: January 7th, 2010
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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