I often find that teams that have adopted Agile practices quickly plateau. They often start by scheduling a daily stand up, planning in iterations, take time for a retrospective, and modify their estimation process. These are common first steps in the agile adoption process. Teams have varied success and commitments to these practices but nevertheless these are the low hanging fruits in the Agile adoption journey.
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ category
Next Step in Agility
October 1st, 2011Learning a new Language
September 2nd, 2011I attended a No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium a few weeks ago. One of the main emphasis during the weekend was learning new languages that are available on the JVM. While there are a variety of reasons that we need to take time to learn new programming languages, one of the most profound is learning to think about problems differently.
Paradigm Shift
When I entered the development scene I was immersed in Object Oriented programming. As a result, I tend to think of good design in objects. A few years ago I began to learn and apply Groovy. With closures I was able to bleed into the realm of Functional programming. This gave me a small taste of a new paradigm. I thought of new ways to solve problems that I couldn’t see with Java. I can only imagine how much more I could learn if I developed exclusively in a Functional language for several months.
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Spring Injection with @Resource, @Autowired and @Inject
August 1st, 2011Overview
I’ve been asked several times to explain the difference between injecting Spring beans with ‘@Resource’, ‘@Autowired’, and ‘@Inject’. While I received a few opinions from colleagues and read a couple of posts on this topic I didn’t feel like I had a complete picture.
Annotations
| Annotation | Package | Source |
|---|---|---|
| @Resource | javax.annotation | Java |
| @Inject | javax.inject | Java |
| @Qualifier | javax.inject | Java |
| @Autowired | org.springframework.bean.factory | Spring |
In order to explore the behavior of each annotation I fired up Spring Tool Suite and started debugging the code. I used Spring 3.0.5.RELEASE in my research. The following is a summary of my findings.
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Creating an Open Source Project
July 1st, 2011Open Sourcing Software
I’ve been using open source software for many years, but I’ve never open sourced my own project. This blog is a record of my experience as I start this journey. The resulting project can be found at http://beanoh.org.
Where
First I had to decide where to store the code. There are several popular (Comparison of open source software hosting) open source hosting options. I chose GitHub (github.com) because I already had an account and I’m comfortable using Git. Furthermore, GitHub provides intuitive tools that make it easy to manage a project. I can setup an organization so multiple Source Allies employees can have commit rights on this project. GitHub also has an integrated issue and feature tracking system that connects commits with tickets. Overall I am very impressed with GitHub.
Moving to a new home
April 29th, 2011As of May 2nd I will no longer be employed at Source Allies. My blog has a new home at http://blog.sudr.info. Feel free to follow me there.
Rethinking the DAO-Service layer relationship
April 8th, 2011Lately I have been thinking that the standard service-calling-the-dao-layer architecture hasn’t been working out as well as I would hope. The applications I have been working on have been using Spring and Hibernate with a dao object per model object. While this does provide a good separation between the two, I have been finding it increasingly difficult to write good tests for the service layer as the project matures. Past experience has shown that if writing tests is difficult, then it just isn’t done. Follow along as I think about possible ways to address this issue.
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Greasemonkey
February 18th, 2011Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that leverages javascript to modify the look and functionality of a page. At first glance this tool looks like a neat toy. However, this tool came in quite handy at one of our clients recently.
Our client was tracking their daily status on a whiteboard in a conference room. A corporate memo was sent out banning the exclusive use of whiteboards for teams. As a result we turned to our web-based tracking tool. Unfortunately their whiteboard equivalent was clunky and inadequate. I spent a few hours putting together a Greasemonkey script that altered the look of this page to mimic our old whiteboard. These changes helped ease this transition.
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Transactions Our Invisible Allies
January 28th, 2011Transactions are an essential component in enterprise software development. When your application works properly you rarely think about transactions. However, when things go wrong debugging transactions can be quite challenging. Instead of being reactive we need to proactively test our transactions.
When I first got into the software industry I was a manual tester. Those years of repetition and tedium drove me to the world of coding and automation. As a software developer I am committed to automated testing. If a feature is worth coding it is worth testing. Automated tests have positioned me to be proactive instead of reactive. Nevertheless, transactions are quite challenging to test.
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Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 4
March 10th, 2010This is the last and final part on my SpringOne 2009 experience. It’s late catching up to the 3 earlier posts but it’s here now. This post summarizes the sessions I attended from day 4 and wraps up with a summary of my take aways. If you want to catch up here are the three earlier posts:
- Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 1
- Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 2
- Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee Day 3
Read on for day 4.
