Musings of a Software Development Manager

It’s been about 7-8 months since we started to serious pilot Fitnesse on a project. Looks like its turning the corner. Instead of developers driving it, the QA staff are starting to build out acceptance tests and add scenarios. It’s coming in very handy for testing a huge number of edits based on a positional [...]

Chapter 3 Ruby Eye for the Java Guy Rails For Java Developers One of those silent chuckle to yourself moments.

Apparently JB’s entry on Wikipedia is up for deletion. He comments on the whole process of the debate around his deletion as: The whole experience makes me feel like I’m in a room with people talking about me while not acknowledging my presence and not seeming to care what I think about that. I can’t [...]

In number the great bulk of projects I see are small maintenance or minor enhancement projects. They’re done in a day or a week or two by a single developer. Adding anyone or even the overhead of something like Scrum is counter-productive. My assumption has been you hand off the assignment and let the individual [...]

Developers have no love of estimates. They’ve been pinned in a corner by an estimate and beaten to a pulp. “But you said it would be done by Friday!” I don’t have any problem with a developer being reluctant to give an estimate. I do have a problem with developers refusing to give estimates unless [...]

I’ve battled the EJB beast and come back scarred and wounded. I’ve tried many approaches and found none to satisfying. First, there was hope with MockEJB, I got it working for some simple cases, but I got bogged down with more complicated test setups and dealing with intercepting EntityBean test methods. Next came the idea [...]

I actually see people putting the cart before the horse. They want to go out and buy a registry. I’ve actually talked to a really large company. “We just bought a registry, we spent a lot of money.” I said, “Great how many services are you gonna put in that registry?” “Well we have three [...]

I once thought Javadoc was a great tool. I added an ant target for every project I built. Now it’s just clutter. I saw another example of the pain point of Javadoc again recently on an internal project that isn’t designed to ever be used as an API: 123456789/* * Returns Publisher when passed Id [...]

I had a lingering issue resolving connection to an outside VPN and getting into a CVS repository for weeks. I’ve been on and off trying to get it resolved between typical management tasks. Today I mentioned it as an impediment in Scrum where I’ve volunteered to do some coding. By 1:30 in the afternoon the [...]

Testing legacy code is tough. It was never designed for tests. The app uses EJBs including old fashioned entity beans. After spending some time trying to get a few tests written against a stateless session bean using MockEJB, I hit upon a new idea. Maybe I want to test at the Business Delegate layer and [...]