If you ever wrote for a Sys-Con publication, be prepared for a surprise – you’re a contributor to the “visionary genius” that is Ulitzer (as in ‘Pulitzer’ without the ‘P’ … or the prize). Many of the smartest programmers I know are on the Straight-Talking Java mailing list, a list that was organised from a [...]
The other day I realised that on the Eclipse installation on my Mac I didn’t have any Subversion ‘team provider’ plugins installed. Most people who use the Eclipse platform with Subversion will realise that there are two Subversion plugins available for it – Subversive and Subclipse. It appears that the Subversive plugin is now the [...]
Client has a vicious network policy installed with prevents access to the rest of the world’s internet, unless you use the web proxy. How to make Maven use this proxy? Well, the documentation for Maven is perfectly easy to search, and you’ll find that it says to add the following to your ~/.m2/settings.xml: <settings> … [...]
Recently I found a Maven plugin that wouldn’t run under Maven version 2.0.6, and I had to upgrade it on my Macintosh. I quickly discovered the usual *nix upgrade (unpack, then update ${PATH}) didn’t seem to work, as the Macintosh OS X 10.5 comes with Maven pre-installed in /usr/share/ directory. Tip – I found where [...]
What’s the problem with reporting the amount of work we’ve completed the last iteration in story points? Story points are a somewhat arbitrary, but consistent measure of the technical complexity to implement a feature. But that’s not the problem with reporting them to management. The thing is, it’s not what management are interested in. Consider [...]
XP: After 10 years why are we still talking about it? By Robert C. Martin. Uncle Bob argues passionately, and correctly, for the principles of software craftsmanship. Link: http://www.viddler.com/explore/sergiopereira/videos/7/.
This is a set of the slides for a presentation introducing Extreme Programming and Agile by Jason Yip. It’s pretty good explanation of agile development principles. An Introduction to XP and Agile View more presentations from Jason Yip.
Sprint to the lead in your industry – and stay there! So says the back of the dust cover on Chasing The Rabbit: How market leaders outdistance the competition and how great companies can catch up and win by Steven J Spear (McGraw Hill, New York, 2009). I referenced this book last week in my [...]
Here is a primer for business people wanting to know what all the terminology in Agile means to them: What You Need To Know About Agile (PDF). It maps the various agile practices like TDD, Iterative Development, Retrospectives, Backlog, Continuous Integration, User Stories and so forth onto common business categories like Increased Quality, Process Visibility, [...]
On the scrum development mailing list, Dave Nicollette recommended shortening sprint length until it failed, then backing up one step: “Oh, my God! You’re going to let a sprint fail, just so you can determine the optimum length?” Yes. In other words, failure lets you learn your limits. But more importantly, as suggested here, is [...]