Posted by Jan Vermeir at around evening time: February 8th, 2011
We’ve been busy for a couple of weeks now refactoring a fairly complex code base of just under 500 classes. None of us really knew all the details about this part of the system, but we didn’t let that stop us of course. After some regrouping/-shuffling/-factoring/*ing, the whole thing built OK and all unit tests were green again. All that was left to do was fix the Fitnesse tests. I remember thinking this should be easy since we had all those green unit test.
Evil laughter sounds.
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Posted by Xebia App Incubator in the early evening: February 7th, 2011
This is the first update since we started development on the LogStore. Despite the bumpy ride, we have quite a lot accomplished.
To summarize, the LogStore is a storage solution for logging statements. It’s based on CouchDB (document oriented database) and Elastic Search (schemaless search engine). The view on the log statements stored is built on CouchApp, a tool on CouchDB for creating HTML pages that are served directly from CouchDB instead of a separate application server.
Posted by Friso van Vollenhoven in the early afternoon: February 7th, 2011
Q: “Where in the world was the situation in Egypt the hottest talk of the town?”
A: “People in UK / London were all over it, also the Middle East and US east coast cities show more interest than the rest of the world.”
Q: “How do you know?”
A: “Just take a couple hundred thousand Twitter messages containing ‘egypt’ and run them through a MapReduce job that counts the number of messages per location and plot that on a map like this:”
(http://geocommons.com/maps/49541)
The map shows the number of Twitter messages containing the word ‘egypt’ that originated from locations around the world. A larger circle means more messages from that place. The messages were gathered during a five hour period on january 28, the day after the Egyptian internet was crippled.
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Posted by Age Mooij in the late afternoon: February 3rd, 2011
Trying to produce bad quality code is quite hard when you are using Test Driven Development (TDD), even when you are doing it wrong on purpose.
Recently Iwein and me were preparing some labs for a developer training and the plan was to create some really bad quality Java code as a starting point. Students would then be asked to clean it up and add some new features, all this of course with the intent to show the effect of bad code quality on your ability to quickly add new features. This was going to be a piece of cake!
After some brainstorming for interesting standalone programming challenges, we came up with the idea of writing a JSON to XML converter. It should be able to take any valid JSON string and convert it into a simple XML representation. Out of habit and without really considering the option of skipping this step, we started with a simple failing test. Here it is:
@Test
public void shouldConvertTopLevelEmptyArray() {
assertThat(converter.convert("[]"), is("<array></array>"));
}
Simple, right? To implement our converter we decided to use the well known “red, green, as little refactoring as possible” anti-pattern, which we expected to result in lots of copy-paste duplication, very long methods, and the other typical code smells we all know and loath. Our first implementation approach was to go for some all-time favorite candidates for producing bad code: string manipulation and regular expressions. As Jamie Zawinski famously said: “When some people have a problem, they think: ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions’. Then they have two problems.” We had created a sure thing recipe for disaster. It was going to be all downhill from here, or so we thought.
Posted by Geert Bossuyt in the wee hours: February 1st, 2011
What is it about waterfall we want to avoid ? It’s mostly the transition moments ! A lot of information is simply lost when you transfer it from one person to another. Another thing we want to avoid is to create a strict order in things because this leads to limiting flexibility. Still, Sprint Zero, is a commonly used practice, and it implies to happen before anything else right ?
So how to do a Sprint 0 in a smart way ? Use these principles :
- A length of more than 1 week for Sprint Zero is way too long
- Spending half of Sprint Zero on training and teambuilding is only nearly enough
- To do more than strictly needed to start the first sprint is too much
- The outcome of Sprint Zero is a jump start for Sprint One.
Posted by Niklas Odding around lunchtime: January 26th, 2011
This blog is the second of a series of blogs in which I will examine the role of architects in Scrum. Last week I started with the forgotten questions of Scrum. In this blog I will look in more detail to the Agile Manifesto and the agile values.
Architects and the agile values
Most of the literature concerning the role of architects in an agile context focuses on the Agile flow itself and how architects can avoid disturbing that flow. Mike Cohn, in his book “succeeding with agile” makes the distinction between coding & non-coding architects. In where he states that the coding architects will have less trouble finding their new role in de Agile development process.
An architect within a team has to be able to code himself. He is a team member, who has more experience in structuring the application being build compared to other team members. By using that experience he can add value to the team. Scrum has no particular role for non-coding architects. The question rises if this is totally true. (more…)
Posted by Geert Bossuyt at around evening time: January 17th, 2011
Just like the Agile Manifesto was a shock 10 years ago, the MoreAgile Manifesto creates some shock effects now.
Responsibility is scary, Business value is undefined, partnership feels impossible and change is kind of accepted but not loved.
- Over the next coming years expert professionals will become very rare, so employers will have to make the difference by creating the best possible workplace. Part of this will be that responsibility embraces empowerment and that the freedom that comes with this will be the only thing wanted by this professionals.
- Business Value is already important today, however difficult to measure. The Lean and SixSigma movements are creating a setting where not measuring value is not done. This expertise will be the a good basis to use as a logical measurement tool for success in software delivery.
- Endusers are rapidly maturing into strong groups with an opinion that matters. Social media will help them to raise their voice. Service companies and software suppliers will have no other option but to deliver services in partnership to catch up with the high demands from the market.
- The speed of change will go up for another couple of decades. Sprints of 2 weeks are far to long, waiting to see something in production that is already finished will no longer be accepted. Just responding to change will simply not be enough. We have to love change.
It took us 10 years to create a world where the ideas of the Agile Manifesto are accepted and commonly used. Likewise, MoreAgile is not something we will easily achieve. The ideas are bolt and a lot of things need to change before we can really work MoreAgile.
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: January 11th, 2011
This year I spend New Year’s Eve at the beach near the small village of Marsa Alam in Egypt. The point of the holiday was to go scuba diving for a week on some of the best reefs in the world in the Red Sea.
What I learned during this week is just how powerful stories are. And that they do not need to be big or elaborate. Let me explain.
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Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: January 6th, 2011
2010 has ended and a new year has begun. 2010 offered us a lot of learning opportunities. It was a good year for the Agile community in the Netherlands and in the world. We saw more and more big corporations embrace Agile methodologies and put serious effort into making it work for them, mostly as a project methodology. ‘Agile adoption’ was THE 2010 word, maybe on par with ‘Wikileak’. So what do we think will be hot in 2011?
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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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