Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: November 29th, 2011
Whether the driver is Agile, Cloud or DevOps1, or a “plain old” efficiency drive or process improvement initiative, forward-thinking organisations are currently looking for ways to improve their application release processes through automation. In an area where manual activities are still all too common, it’s unsurprising that the initial focus has been on automating the deployment execution – moving all the bits to the right places.
What early adopters have learnt is that, at the enterprise scale, automating release execution quickly introduces a new bottleneck in today’s dynamic IT environments: continuous management of the deployment plan definition. A new generation of application release automation (ARA) tooling avoids this pitfall by leveraging intelligence to automate deployment planning as well as execution.
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Posted by Friso van Vollenhoven mid-afternoon: November 29th, 2011
I made a map of my followers on Twitter. This is not entirely straight forward, as most Twitter users don’t attach geo coordinates to their tweets or profiles. Luckily, many people leave something sensible in the location field of their profile (e.g. ‘Amsterdam’ or ‘London, UK’). You can match this field against a Lucene index of all the cities in the world, which I happen to have. I was able to place 15 out of my grand total of 19 followers on the map.
Followers of @fzk:
Why is this important? Read on! Also, somewhere down the line I will explain how to make such a map for your own account.
Note: this is a cross post. You can see the original here: http://waredingen.nl/twitter-data-fun.
Posted by Kristian Spek mid-afternoon: November 26th, 2011
When I start a new consulting job at an organization, I like to ask people how their organization became the organization it is today. Most of the time, people start telling me about the history of their organization or the values and goals they have. People sometimes start telling me about the people who work in the organization. But I have never got an answer that fullfilled my question completely. What made organizations what they are right now? After reading ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ written by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I got an answer that could help me structure all the answers people gave to me. (more…)
Posted by Urs Peter in the wee hours: November 26th, 2011
For testing a restful service API I was looking for a lean library, which would allow me to test CRUD operations of rest services with as little code as possible.
My search led me to Dispatch, which is a highly compact Scala DSL wrapper around Apache’s reliable HttpClient. This DSL, however, is not very well documented and rather hard to decipher due to it’s heavy usage of symbolic method names but nevertheless highly appealing when understood.
In this blog I’ll decipher it for you and show how easy it is to test restful services with mere oneliners.
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: November 25th, 2011
I am convinced that the next blue ocean of agile minds can be found in the creation of sharing ecosystems that are built on shared purpose, trust, intuition and a facilitation of the deeply wired human urge to cooperate as a collective. Understanding that modern day individualism is smothering our effectiveness is a catalyst for our drive to start working together and forming the effectiveness of these systems.
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Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: November 24th, 2011
Imagine you are playing a game of rugby against some blacksuited guys who are doing some odd dancing and screaming exercise before you finally get to start playing. You win the game 27 – 3. You can imagine it wasn’t just one beer at the big party after the match and you did not see home before early morning. A year later your team finds itself in the same stadium against the same guys, doing the same little piece of folk dancing, just a little louder than last year. This time you win 27 – 6, only. The coach and the crowd are going mad: your team lost half of its performance in just a year time! You take a shower, no beers, go home and go to bed early. Measuring the improvement in performance is easy! How about Scrum teams? ….
Posted by Arno den Hond at around evening time: November 14th, 2011
Unlike announced in my previous post this one is neither soon nor on a surprise topic. It is about a general aspect of Android that is, to my opinion, very powerful but often under utilized.
Android apps are not monolithic but rather a collection of components of different kinds. I suspect android took inspiration from the concept of midlet suites in j2me and believe it expanded on that quite well.
These components (except for provider) can be exposed through intent filters in the package’s manifest and can be used by other components in different packages. This allows apps to accomplish tasks together which a single app could never do.
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Posted by Jan Vermeir in the early evening: November 12th, 2011
Getting the Java out of your Scala, part 2
I’m still trying to get rid of old habits, to shake of my winter hide, so to speak, and create some real Scala in stead of ScaVa (i.e. Java with a Scala syntax). If you’re interested you can bear witness to my struggle on GitHub (ShoppingList on GitHub). This story came about because I asked some colleagues for help. We ended up rewriting loops in several ways.
What I’ll show you is some alternatives to classic loops over collections.
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Posted by Cirilo Wortel in the late evening: November 2nd, 2011
Last week I joined the QA&TEST conference in the beautiful town of Bilbao. In this post I’ll give an impression of some of the presentations I attended to and the idea’s I picked up. Most valuable sessions I attended were “Pushing the Boundaries of User Experience” by Julien Harty and “Automated Reliability Testing via hardware interfaces” by Bryan Bakker. Read about it in more detail in the article.
Posted by Iwein Fuld just before lunchtime: November 2nd, 2011
In the past years there has been much ado about the quality of software. Programmers have emancipated and evolved into software craftsmen. Metrics have been defined and honed to measure the quality of code and deliverable artifacts. More and more of our clients are asking for guidance in achieving higher and higher quality goals.
The discussion about software craftsmanship hasn’t been all positive. Many developers that I’ve worked with express the feeling that certain levels of quality are only driven by the personal gratification of craftsmen and not in line with the economic realities of our trade. In this article I strive to establish guidelines in the compromise between quality and speed. I feel it is warranted to be more nuanced than the simplistic statement: “Going fast by going well”. This is because “going well” can mean different things in different contexts.
I look for a line in the sand between improving quality to improve procreation and improving quality for mere self indulgent practice.
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