Posted by Friso van Vollenhoven in the early afternoon: November 29th, 2010
At Xebia, we show a lot of interest in the developing NoSQL community and all the great software and solutions that result from it. Big data analysis and heavy traffic web sites and applications are here to stay and we need solutions capable of dealing with those. The commodity stack of some flavor of relational database with a Java app server on top and the stateful model of server side sessions just doesn’t cut it in some cases. As data volume and traffic grow, these cases will present themselves increasingly often. In our App Incubator program we see a lot of interest in non relational databases and stateless server side setups with more logic on the client side (cleverly coined: NoJSP). Also, at clients the problem of ever growing data sets and the lack of options to do proper analysis with existing tools and databases starts to arise. One of these clients is the RIPE NCC. The story is roughly this: about 80GB of data comes in per day and there is ten years of historical data of the same kind and volume; we need to do queries against this and get sub-second answers. We solve this with the use of Hadoop en HBase.
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Posted by Geert Bossuyt in the late afternoon: November 28th, 2010
Scrum and Agile are not synonyms. Scrum describes a process ( a set of activities) but its only Agile when you do this activities in an Agile mindset.
You can easily be Agile without using Scrum, and it’s definitely possible to do Scrum in a way that is not Agile.
Having a good metaphor can help speed up the understanding.
If Scrum is like riding a bike, then Agile would be the sense of balance.
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Posted by Vincent Partington in the early afternoon: November 25th, 2010
In a previous blog, I compared deployment automation to build automation. I wrote about the differences between the build and the deployment process and I explained why different features are required from the respective automation tools. In this blog I will explain the difference between release management and deployment and why release management tools that claim they do deployment automation are actually doing something different. And why that is a good thing. 
Let’s start by defining release management. While Wikipedia might define release management as a relatively new discipline in the application lifecycle management space, it has actually been a part of ITIL v2 since its release in 2000. It concerns itself with the management of software releases. Courtesy of the ITIL Open Guide, the key activities of release management are:
Posted by Jan Vermeir in the early morning: November 16th, 2010
Software vendors have hijacked a potentially useful concept by pushing heavy weight complex tools like ESBs. The goal of this article is to find out which of those tools we really need so we can stay away from unnecessary complexity. I’ll do that by describing the infrastructure services we really need and how these services can be implemented in the simplest possible way.
Software depends on other software because we don’t want to build systems from scratch. Each piece of software your code depends on may:
- change the address or name by which it is known
- change the technology it is implemented in
- be unavailable when you need it
- live on a different server or in the same process
- be connected through infrastructure that cannot be trusted
- speak a different language
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Posted by Robert van Loghem mid-afternoon: November 11th, 2010
Last week (november 3rd) Andrew Phillips and myself did a presentation on continuous deployment at the awful (so we thought) hour of 8 o’clock in the morning for the NLJUG. We only expected a handful of attendees but fortunately the day before we were told that we had moved to a bigger conference room because of the great number of people signing up! So at 8 o’clock we had about <100 people in the room! So, if you were there, thanks for coming so early, we really appreciate it. It of-course shows that continuous deployment is a hot topic 
Doing the continuous deployment talk at JFall
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Posted by Maarten Winkels mid-afternoon: November 5th, 2010
When applying agile methods to existing software development practices, it is often useful to start from the basics. For regression testing this boils down to:
- Regression testing ensures continuity of business functions.
- In an agile context it helps the team focus on the (new) functionality to develop in the sprint while maintaining overall stability.
- To maximally utilize regression testing in an agile context, test automation and continuous execution should be applied.
- It is important to realize the difference between functional tests and regression tests to avoid some common pitfalls.
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