Eclipse has a ‘guess the button’ user interface.

–James Noble

I’m working up some JUnit examples and figuring I’ll just use Eclipse for the example code and labs, but of course big, bad, horrible interface Eclipse nips up and bites me.

It is so easy to get lost in the interface in wizard and button hell. I spent an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t run a unit test. Turned out I had checked out the project from CVS (CVS > Checkout Projects from CVS), but I didn’t then create a new java project using the Java Project Wizard so I had a project that I thought was a Java project, but actually didn’t have any language specific features. The worst part is it’s so easy to do.

I remember now why I bought Eclipse in Action soon after playing with it back on my old Ti Powerbook. I suppose if I spent a lot of time in it the nasty interface issues would fade away to some extent, but why do I have to go through the hell.

End of rant, must get sleep. And, yes, I’m an IntelliJ IDEA fan.

I run a semi-regular development architecture meeting that involves pretty much all of my company’s senior java developers. On the agenda today was how to drive TDD into the development group successfully. Though not unexpected I got lots of the following:

• Well, if you want us to write lots of unit tests it’s going to take a lot longer.
• I’m really not sold on testing. I’m an old school developer, you’ll really have to convince me.
• We should buy the developers a unit testing book and expect them to read it, no that probably won’t work.
• I hate writing tests first because you’re just going to change the code and then you have to change the tests, it’s just a lot of grunt work.

The end result is right now out of the 6 senior developers in the room, only one of them has become test infected, and he can often fall back into bad habits given some time pressure. I just hope the presentations, seminars, and pair programming I’m about to embark on is successful.

Reading through Ken Pugh’s Prefactoring I came across a mention of the Napkin Look & Feel Toolkit. It appears to be a very slick representation of a swing environment which looks like it could have been scrawled on a napkin.

Too bad since we pretty much only do web apps I probably won’t get to use it. It could work generically for a UI, but some of the elements like a tree menu are a lot more trouble to put together in HTML. The danger is always that the client, even from a napkin drawing, can get the wrong idea about how the UI will function. Still I might experiment with it despite the danger.

Back in June I went through the pain of trying to make my way through Spring: A Developer’s Notebook. It turns out that Bruce Tate himself admitted that the book was badly done in his Amazon one star review:

My appologies to all readers, and O’Reilly customers. I let you down. There’s no other way to put it. This book’s quality sucked.

Makes me feel justified in my frustrations. It does bring up huge issues about O’Reilly’s editing standards. If most the examples don’t actually work how did this ever get published?

This is a snapshot of an Excel Sprint Burndown spreadsheet for one of my projects. My employee, let’s call him George P. Burdell, isn’t allowed to be a Scrummaster. It’s political, but basically they want to move real slow with rolling out Scrum, so we’re doing it anyway in “super secret squirrel” mode. Hence funny little notations like this one.