I just picked up my new laptop at BestBuy. Its an Asus X83Vm-X2, with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB, an NVidia 9600M GS with its own 1GB, 320GB HDD and Vista Home Premium 64..
Nice!
Now the fun part. Moving off my trusty, heavy and VERY noisy Dell Inspiron 9100 and figuring out what won’t run natively on Vista 64.
Keyboard is a little different but I’ll get used to it.
Happy Valentine’s Day she says..
Yes!
In this post, Stephan Schmidt says Martin Fowler misses the point because Scrum is not about engineering practices (see here).
Actually, Stephan, you missed Martin’s point.
Martin’s post says essentially, that Scrum is gaining a reputation as an agile process that doesn’t work. That is happening because the people who are adopting Scrum as their process believe that the management processes provided are enough and/or they aren’t aware of the engineering practices that are required to support it.
Professional developers do get it. They get that they need the discipline of the engineering practices. They need that discipline regardless of the process by-the-way.
Unfortunately, the IT world is full of developers who don’t get it. And their managers know they need to do something to try and change things. Scrum has a corporately acceptable brand because it sounds like fast waterfall. And, by-the-way, it doesn’t specify any engineering practices to help support the process.
Martin doesn’t miss the point. That’s exactly his point.
The day after my last blog post about the standards group’s seemingly knee-jerk reaction to our CI choice, the group collectively got together and decided that encouraging CI was more important than the tool being used.
They got it. All I had to do was point it out, and after some thought, they agreed.
I feel better about this process..
I’ve been chasing my development comrades around for a year or so, convincing them that test-driven development is a good thing. That continuous integration is a great way to show what a great job we’re doing by being transparent – posting our success and coverage numbers for everyone to see.
All the developers I can get to try it come back saying, “You know, I wouldn’t have caught this bug before it went to production without TDD.”
Score! A convert!
We set up a CI server running JetBrains’ TeamCity. Dead easy and it’s been working great. We have about four development teams using CI this way now – we’re still working on the testing – and even the configuration management group likes what they’re seeing.
So what’s the problem?
Memo from the standards group. “Uh, we don’t have TeamCity on our list. Your choices are, CruiseControl, Rational Buildforge, or Team Foundation Team Build.”
My response was, “Okay, but we’re in the middle of a transition here. Do you suppose we could just go ahead and change over later (once the habit is good and engrained)?”
Their answer? “We’re not comfortable with that”
I am getting a lot of support from the local management, so hopefully things will brighten in the next day or so.
Next.. Can I get you guys to estimate in some TDD time?
Just to separate things, I’ve decided to start a second weblog for my Life in America entries; that way I won’t be wasting your time when you come looking..
If you care, you’ll find those entries here
I’ve also started a separate blog for the Repellicans ‘cause they’re a mess and I like to isolate messes like that.. as in refactoring.
You can find the mess, and the fun over here
Anne Coulter – Noteworthy only for her capacity to say outrageously false things with conviction. Nomination accepted.
John Boehner (R) – Minority House Leader, who believe that the government stimulus package should give more money to people to pay down debts or invest somewhere instead of having the government actually spend it in the country thereby stimulating the economy.
The Democrats have a majority in both houses. Why is this an issue? There are ways to stop a filibuster in the Senate too, so that shouldn’t be an excuse.
Looks like the Democrats’ Leadership needs to get some backbone. Still.
Charter Members of the Repellican Party:
Unfortunately, the membership committee is still accepting nominations
My wife came up with a new name for the Obama naysayers: Repellicans.
These folks are not necessarily Republicans because there are a large number of Republicans who are openly supportive of the new president, including, but not limited to, Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.
Her first nominee for this ‘party’ is Chris Wallace of Fox News (what else?) who apparently was the first to call into question whether President Obama was legitimately sworn in yesterday.
(Note: I said, as soon as Chief Justice Roberts flubbed the lines, “The right wingers are gonna be all over that!” And, sadly, I was correct.)
I think I’d have to add the senator from Texas, John Cornyn who is holding back on the confirmation of the nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Repellican Party Charter Members:
When I started this blog, my intention was to regale the reader with pithy and insightful pronouncements on the state of software development.
Since I didn’t want to maintain multiple blogs, I thought I’d put the odd stray commentary about life or books or politics on here too.
Naturally, what happened was that I didn’t do as much of the software stuff, and a lot more of the commentary stuff. Software topics became the stray.. Astray to be honest.
So, for once in a long while I thought I should do a post on software.
It should be plain to my readers (the two of you out there) that the company I joined in late 2007, was bought out by the Bank of America. Nice, right?
Absolutely!
For a bank, it is surprisingly flexible about things like open source (there’s an official FOSS group in the bank) , agile development (we have two standard and supported SDLCs — one is agile; guess the other) and personal involvement (we have an internal open source-style repository and user groups).
Great!
The one thing that irks is that we aren’t allowed to have mini test databases on our individual machines, whether laptop or desktop. Security is the thing, and not unwarranted. We don’t need some goof leaving a laptop in his car with a few hundred thousand customers’ data on it.
What we need is a way to sanitize the data so that it’s useful for testing, but useless for outsiders — or even larcenous insiders.
Gerard Meszaros’ book, xUnit Test Patterns lists using a centralized testing database as an anti-pattern. Agreed.
So, how to go forward?
The database can help if it is aware of the relationships between tables. A semi-sophisticated script can replace any identifiable information with bogus but readable chaff. The keys used can be replaced with matching but unuseful values.
These exist, right? I mean, why don’t we hear about them more?
Is this another open source project waiting to be started? I haven’t looked, but maybe I will tonight…
So, I’m traveling to Toronto for the annual pilgrimage to the homeland for the holidays. This time, for the first time in probably 6-7 years, my travel plans are threatened by winter weather.
The forecast is for snow. Again. But I think that the folks at Lester Pearson International know how to handle snow. Since I’m flying direct, I’m hoping that’s enough to insure safe passage.
Just in case, I have three pieces of reading material to keep me company. A novel, a magazine and a non-fiction tome.
The novel is “Next”, by the lamentably late Michael Crichton. I’m sad to see a Renaissance man’s untimely departure. Just started. Review to follow.
The magazine is Wired, January 2009. An article on whether we should actually look for a cure for cancer, or simply look for ways to find it faster, caught my eye. There’s an article about an individual aircraft too; the Icon A5. Looking forward to relative fluff there..
The non-fiction tome is, “Spin-Free Economics“, by Nariman Behravesh. So far, a partisan-free look at economic issues with a forward that chides both sides for perpetrating myths to their own ends. Looking forward to delving further.
More to follow..
If my eyes tire, and the trip wears on, I have my trusty iPod loaded with NPR shows to keep me stimulated.
Yeah, I have music too.
So, I’m traveling to Toronto for the annual pilgrimage to the homeland for the holidays. This time, for the first time in probably 6-7 years, my travel plans are threatened by winter weather.
The forecast is for snow. Again. But I think that the folks at Lester Pearson International know how to handle snow. Since I’m flying direct, I’m hoping that’s enough to insure safe passage.
Just in case, I have three pieces of reading material to keep me company. A novel, a magazine and a non-fiction tome.
The novel is “Next”, by the lamentably late Michael Crichton. I’m sad to see a Renaissance man’s untimely departure. Just started. Review to follow.
The magazine is Wired, January 2009. An article on whether we should actually look for a cure for cancer, or simply look for ways to find it faster, caught my eye. There’s an article about an individual aircraft too; the Icon A5. Looking forward to relative fluff there..
The non-fiction tome is, “Spin-Free Economics“, by Nariman Behravesh. So far, a partisan-free look at economic issues with a forward that chides both sides for perpetrating myths to their own ends. Looking forward to delving further.
More to follow..
If my eyes tire, and the trip wears on, I have my trusty iPod loaded with NPR shows to keep me stimulated.
Yeah, I have music too.
