Notes from a Tool User

On vacation

This blog will return to life the week of Aug. 13.

Attending Agile 2007

I while be attending Agile 2007 in a few weeks and thought it might be fun to write down some of things I'm hoping to discover:

In the large (department/company wide issues):

1. Finding executives and other senior people at large companies who are (or have) adopted Agile. I would like to find people we can ask occasional questions of (and they can ask us).
2. Find out what issues people have coordinating projects in a tiered environment. In our cases some of our stack is 10 layers deep
3. What issues do people have coordinating many related projects running in parallel? Consider a as many as 30+ teams working on 15+ projects all of which must be released as one platform. How do we handle dependency and risk management?
4. Key lessons learned: critical success factors and pitfalls to avoid when doing agile in the large
5. Hearing others Agile adoption experience (there are several sessions on this subject) in particular what went wrong, what would they do differently?

In the small:

1. How do others do acceptance testing for Rich Clients? Is anyone doing acceptance testing with Eclipse?
2. How others are keep Continuous Improvement alive on Agile Teams? Some teams I've seen find a plateau and don't move on from there.
3. What are other people’s experiences doing Agile development with distributed teams - sometimes with each team member in a different location?

BTW here is the complete list of conference events:http://www.agile2007.com/index­.php?page=sub/ (keep in mind: it’s sold out already)

Whats on your mind? What do you want to get out of the conference? Tell what your goals are and I will blog about what I learn.

Look me at the conference – let’s have a chat and perhaps a pint. Leave a comment so I know who to look for.

BTW I (and this blog) are on vacation for the next two weeks so your comments won't approved until I get back.

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On Safari with Nathan Myhrvold. Or will work for used 600mm VR.

Nathan Myhrvold (yes that Nathan) is apparently a prize winning photographer and occasionally writer. He has recently written an excellent article Digital Safari Equipment Tips. Unfortunately Nathan has lost touch with the world the rest of us inhabit. He recommends we have nearly $30,000 worth of equipment saying its a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity both to experience incredible scenery and wildlife and to make some amazing photographs". Sure it is Nathan.

Which Mock to Mock with? JMock? RMock? EasyMock?

After years of making half hearted attempts at test driven development I’m finally taking the plunge and doing it properly. After only  a few days of doing TDD I got tired of implementing interfaces long hand. It’s especially annoying since you typically only care about one or two methods in the object but have to fill them all out. The trouble comes for the reader of your code who can’t tell immediately what return values you care about and which ones are the default values that were generated for you. So I began looking for mocking framework. My only criteria must work with Java 1.4 – so no annotations or generics. Based on a thread in the JUnit mailing list Mock Framework reviews (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/junit/message/19315) I decided to give JMock and RMock a try.

Acceptance Testing and Eclipse Rich Client Applications - How to do it?

In my last post I promised a post about something other than Eclipse for my next post. I'm sorry I lied, I had the best of intentions. However the problem of acceptance testing and Rich Client applications has been rattling around in my head for some years now. A couple of years ago I tried this in .NET and didn't have any great success. This time driven by the needs of several projects in my group and reading Bret Pettichord's excellent seminar "Homebrew Test Automation" (PDF) I'm inspired to try again.

Eclipse Madness - Why do fragment plugins work for some Developers and not others?

If you don't do development work in Eclipse - stop reading this post now, come back tomorrow I promise that I will write about something else.

We’re writing our test plugins as fragments to be hosted inside the plugin they’re testing. Most of the time this works without a hitch and gives the benefit of being able to test classes and methods with package (default) visibility. We have several of these plugins that work with no problem both in my Eclipse IDE and our PDE builds. However for one developer one fragment plugin suffers the problem: Host bundle 'xxx.xxx.xxx.common' exists but is unresolved.

What does this mean? What is Eclipse saying? How on Earth do I debug this?

Only getting 340 Megs of usable heap out of 2 Gigs in Java - why the limit?

The challenge - a colleague is trying to write a memory intensive application, he's trying to allocate large chunks of memory and nothing seems to work. Here are his notes:

I'm trying do some memory intensive work in Java and am running into limits far sooner than I would expect.
First of I would like to access as much of the 2GB process limit I can. It would appear that 1.4 GB is the largest amount that can be allocated with the -Xmx switch. So be it.

However we only appear to get use of a small chunk of that. Maxing out around 340MB. Who takes that space? How can get more of it?

Why Scrum Works??

In the previous two posts in this series we examined how Scrum provides value to business and why Scrum helps to form high performance teams. This post continues the second theme examining the remaining elements of Scrum.

Artifacts

Product Backlog

Basics: The product backlog is a prioritized list of features of everything needed and wanted in the finished product. To minimize waste only the next few iterations worth of stories are provided in any detail. The list is maintained by the product owner.

Values Supported:

• Visible Long Term Goal