Flex Testing Toolkit
Posted by Abhishek Agrawal in the late evening: November 19th, 2008
My recent assignment at Albumprinter gave an opportunity to play with flex testing tools available out there. Coming back to serious flex development after more than a year was a pleasant surprise. The state of flex when I last did something on it was for sure not “mature”. There weren’t many frameworks around.
But things have changed a great deal since then. Not only do we have frameworks implementing MVC (Cairngorm) but also some standard extensions (UM extensions) to those frameworks, we also have spring like IOC frameworks (Prana) for Flex.
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My book review appeared on TheServerSide.com
Posted by Balaji D Loganathan in the early evening: November 9th, 2008
What exactly is software quality?
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: November 5th, 2008
That is what I would like to find out today. If you ask a group of developers what it is, the only thing they will agree on is that it is important. Managers will tell you they want high-quality software, but only because it is politically correct to do so. They are more than willing, and usually even eager, to trade in this mysterious quality for more functionality or performance when it is needed.
And who can blame them? What is the business case for something you can not even explain?
We know beautiful code when we see it, but how do we write beautiful software? And the even better question, why would we care?
Team Dynamics – what to expect and do?
Posted by Abhishek Agrawal in the early morning: October 15th, 2008
Effective teamwork is essential in today’s world, but as you’ll know from the teams you have led or belonged to, you can’t expect a new team to perform exceptionally from the very outset. Team formation takes time, and usually follows some easily recognizable stages, as the team journeys from being a group of strangers to becoming united team with a common goal.
As part of my curriculum of “Leadership Training for Software Professionals” at IIM, Bangalore, I came across some very interesting and highly applicable models explaining various stages of team dynamics. It also laid out what we, as managers, should do/expect at various stages of the team maturity.
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My Xebia India experiences
Posted by Kris Geusebroek mid-afternoon: September 3rd, 2008
Because Xebia is cooperating with India a lot in the distributed offshoring model for our projects, I got the opportunity to visit our Indian office last month. The overall goal of this visit was to form a team to handle multiple projects. Besides that I also wanted to get to know the people whom I only saw through Skype and to experience the environment and culture over there.
This blog will be about the second part: Me experiencing India
100 days @Xebia
Posted by Nancy Sharma just before lunchtime: August 25th, 2008
My initial 100 days @ Xebia?
I'll say it takes something “extra” to be here. It calls for the people with perseverance and "ready to take on any challenge" kinda attitude . (more...)
Assembling software: Craftsmanship style
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: August 25th, 2008
Producing valuable, working software is an art. Practicing this art involves intuition (insight), talent and craftsmanship, like practicing any other art. The main principles of this craftsmanship, shared by many other craftsmen, are “know your tools and materials” and “less is more”.
The recent blog by Lars inspired me to write about my perception of craftsmanship in software development.
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Craftsmanship is Mastery
Posted by Lars Vonk just before lunchtime: August 21st, 2008
This is the literal translation of an old dutch saying "Vakmanschap is Meesterschap"; being a master in your profession. In my opinion the lacking of this is one of the biggest problems in software development these days and main reason why projects fail; it isn't a process that caused it, nor the technique that was used: It's actually people that mess up projects! Did the technique or process pick itself or did someone pick the technique or process?
Currently there is also a debate going on whether or not to include Craftsmanship over Execution as fifth value on the Agile Manifesto.
But let's take a step back and try to figure out why we are lacking craftsmanship?
Dealing with changing circumstances
Posted by jmeijer mid-afternoon: August 15th, 2008
Dealing with changing circumstances: The difference between a medal candidate and a medal winner
Imagine: You have trained very hard for the Olympics and are very well prepared. You have an overload of red corpuscles from training in the Himalaya, you have practiced on the Olympic track, you submitted yourself to light therapy to prepare your body for the time zone difference and you have trained in an ill-air conditioned gym to prepare your body for the smog and atmospheric humidity. You are ready for a big performance and you made it through the trials and qualified for the Olympic Games. You passed all medical tests. They examined your hair, blood, sweat and tears, and you are not suspected to have used any kind of stimulating drugs. You definitely are a candidate for an Olympic medal and for eternal fame!
Behavioral traits of an Agile Developer
Posted by Ran Vijay just before lunchtime: August 7th, 2008
Last month, I was going through Lean software development by the lean software gurus Mary and Tom Poppendieck and I could easily associate most, if not all of its principles with our day to day working in Xebia. It really gets interesting and fun to read about something when you are already practicing it. In the process, it reinforces your beliefs on the principles. Although the book was easy to follow and examples easy to associate with, I could not get a clear idea of the term 'right people' mentioned at many places in the book. I always wondered about the definition of 'right' the lean-principles talks about. (more...)
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