Posted by Andrew Phillips in the early morning: August 3rd, 2011
Across all industries, the services delivered by business applications have become an essential part of an enterprise’s customer offering. Bringing new features to market quickly is thus a critical factor in determining a company’s success.
In this post (an extended version of which is available as a whitepaper), we will outline today’s Release Management challenges and discuss the need for Release Automation.
We’ll identify key considerations for successful solutions and highlight why “Zero-Maintenance” is a critical requirement for Release Automation that provides the scalability required in an agile landscape and enables the delivery of continuous business value.
Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: May 3rd, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In this first post, we’ll focus on some of the changes and trends across the industry that have brought such increased business attention to the area of release, deployment and management of applications.
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Posted by Wilfred Springer in the late afternoon: January 6th, 2011
I was listening to the JavaPosse a minute ago. Dick Wall is saying that he figures there is never going to be anything as big as Java ever again.
A couple of weeks ago, I overheard a discussion between a couple of people involved in the music business. They concluded that the days of the megastars are officially over; they didn’t think there would ever be another artist rising to the same levels of stardom as Madonna, Elvis, Michael Jackson or the Beatles.
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Posted by Geert Bossuyt around lunchtime: September 30th, 2010
The tester is a member of a Scrum team. This is a different mindset from the traditional views on testers in software development. The agile tester focuses on delivering value instead of on testing. The agile tester is responsible for delivering what the business needs instead of just finding bugs. Most importantly: the agile tester is not responsible for testing!
Recently I published an article on testing in a Scrum team for the Eurostar 2010 newsletters. It’s about the mindset of an Agile tester. This blog post summarizes the core of that article.
Posted by Rik de Groot in the early afternoon: June 18th, 2010
Working in multidisciplinary teams is common in Agile. In practice this means that the team consists of people with different skills, but work in the same dimension (for instance software). What about cross dimensional teams? In cross dimensions teams not only the skills differ, but also the area of expertise. For instance developing an electronic device includes electronics and software. They work on the same project, but can they act as one team?
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Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the wee hours: November 26th, 2008
Today JavaWorld published my article series “Automated code reviews with Checkstyle” in 2 parts.
Part 1:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 1
Part 2:
Automated code reviews with Checkstyle, Part 2
This article series attempts to bridge the gap of code review with applying automated Checkstyle checks in a complete and proactive way. First goal is to make the task of custom Checkstyle rules creation so simple so that any enterprise IT team could create new custom rules suiting to their project (IT standards) needs.
Second goal is to apply these rules in PROCTIVE fashion. Instead of waiting the build to fail or waiting for rule violation reports and working on them in a reactive way, the idea is to apply these checks proactively with Checkstyle Eclipse plugin or applying them at SVN level itself. Irrespective of which IDE you are using, if your code contains some of the high severity violations, you will not be able to commit the code in SVN. You will see the same kind errors and location on SVN console as you see with Eclipse plugin. This is achieved using SVN pre-commit hooks.
Posted by Maarten Winkels at around evening time: November 3rd, 2008
Today InfoQ has posted my article Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex.
The article describes how the combination of Flex and Grails leads to a highly productive platform for writing JEE applications. It discusses the problems one faces when integrating Flex as client technology and Grails as server technology and details solutions for each of these problems.
The article can be used as a tutorial for writing simple client-server applications with Grails and Flex.
Posted by Guido Schoonheim in the late afternoon: August 21st, 2008
Agile 2008
At Agile2008 in Toronto Jeff Sutherland and myself presented our article outlining how to achieve hyperproductivity in distributed Scrum when working in an offshore situation. InfoQ recorded our presentation and will publish it online in November as the end of a series of Agile2008 talks.
Download article Download presentation
Also see this InfoQ article
Agile and Offshoring, oil and water?
If you are reading the Xebia blog chances are that you are already familiar with the benefits of Agile development. Practicing Agile (in our case Scrum combined with XP) delivers hyperproductivity combined with very high quality. The promise of offshoring in the modern IT industry is also clear: more available talent, scaling up and down without local layoffs or knowledge drain, and of course cost reduction. Together they make a killer combo!
However, Agile and offshoring seem like oil and water, they don’t seem to mix. How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?
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Posted by Vikas Hazrati in the early evening: December 9th, 2007
Most of the times we are content that our code is of the right quality, if somehow, we manage to get the Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools like Checkstyle, PMD etc. report less number of severe violations. As an example if we see that the class is big in size then we conveniently split it into two or more classes to get rid of the violation. The tool is happy and so are we and most of the times that is the end of the story.
However more frequently than not getting an SCA violation is the start of the story. If you start associating the question “Why’ with every SCA violation found then the real reasons start unfolding.
This is similar to the way we resolve impediments on an Scrum project. The impediments rarely represent the isolated incidences of inefficiency. Rather, most of the times they are a part of a larger problem. The way to work out an impediment is fix it so that the team can work effectively and then to look at the root cause which caused the impediment so that the main cause can be fixed. This is called “Bottom-up process re-engineering.”
Similarly the way to work out an SCA violation is to remove it so that the code looks clean and good and then to hunt for the real cause.
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Posted by Vikas Hazrati around lunchtime: April 27th, 2007
15 Stand-up commitments for those crucial 15 minutes
It is another great day, sun shining bright, traffic snarls continuing on roads, the team getting ready for another productive agile day with droopy faces! Droopy faces , why ???
Well because they have to get over the stand-up ritual first before they can get started with some real work.
But is the stand up a ritual??? Aren’t stand-ups supposed to be exciting and energizing???
If this a common question disturbing you for a while then it is time to stand up for the stand-up. The details that follow are meant for any team practicing any Agile methodology like Scrum and who has started thinking that stand-ups are no more than an empty ritual which has to be pushed out at the start of the day.
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