July « 2005 « Musings of a Software Development Manager

Following In My Father’s Footsteps: Hipster PDA

I realized on a short trip back home, that I’ve currently adopted a habit of my Dad. He’s an electrical engineer by training, and he picked up programming pretty early on. I still remember he actually used pocket protectors, built his own television, and proudly showed me his slide rules.

Anyway as early as I [...]

People Shudder When They Work With Maven

In a blog interview Rick Hightower admits that he finds that ant is still ahead of market share with maven. Still he feels that Maven uses a better concept, but the implementation isn’t that great.

My experiences with Maven have been pretty negative. I’ve tried it twice in the past, because I like the concept [...]

Buying Books for Developers

Being a bit of a book nut, in an average month I devour about 3 software development titles. I do a great deal of my learning via the printed page. So I’ve never questioned the value of buying books for developers even encouraging them to order books on any development topic they’re interested in.

I [...]

Ship It and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects is a really quick read. I’m 100 pages deep now and I’ve got two sides of a 3×5 card filled with new ideas including things like lots of constant buddy/mini code reviews instead of pair programming.

I’m sure I’ll end up experimenting with a bunch of [...]

Unit Testing Adoption Curve

Given the amount written about unit testing in general one would think that many organizations had adopted it by now. If XP has done nothing else it had apparently been able to make testing cool with developers. That alone is quite an accomplishment. Some of the signs of its’ widespread popularity include:

After only a [...]

ObjectMother Pattern for Unit Testing

I just came across the ObjectMother pattern for creating a factory object to provide all sorts of test objects for unit testing. Essentially you create a class or classes with lots of nice static methods that return already setup objects for testing. This is especially helpful on larger projects where you have a lot of [...]

Fit for Developing Software

It looks like the book, Fit for Developing Software: Framework for Integrated Tests is out. Since we’re just about to embark on a project to make our largest application more testable and especially more testable for QA I hope this book has some good examples. I’ve spent some time with Fitnesse and been able to [...]

Getter and Setters in Ruby verus Java

I came across a post on a Ruby feature that Todd Huss would like to see in Java:

Native getter/setter support: declaring a list of variables as attr_reader or attr_writer allows getter/setter functionality of a variable without writing/maintaining any redundant getter/setter code, yet if necessary, you can override the default getter/setter behaviour without affecting the [...]

Email with Cruisecontrol on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Getting email from cruisecontrol turned out to be a little more work than planned. Turns out sendmail has been eliminated in favor of Postfix on 10.4 and maybe 10.3, a mail server I know nothing about. After a short run through this article I was up and running.

For now I’m just running it [...]

Splitting Up the Default /lib Directory

Came across an interesting idea in a directory structure for the examples in a Spring tutorial at Zabada Technologies. I’ve never seen it before, but it does solve a common problem I’ve had with mixing jars that were only needed for testing or things like the servlet-api.jar which would already be in any container.

The [...]

Musings of a Software Development Manager