InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Terracotta/Quartz Integration Offers an In-Memory Cluster Based Distributed Job Scheduling
Terracotta and Quartz integration offers an in-memory cluster based distributed job scheduling and workload management for enterprise Java applications. Terracotta recently announced the acquisition of the open source job-scheduling software. The new product gives a node-aware scheduling feature as an alternative to the traditional solution of using a central database for job coordination.
-
Clojure Roundup: Distribution with Crane, Mathematics with Incanter, Builds with Leiningen 1.0
FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.
-
Intellij IDEA 9: Java EE 6, OSGi, Flex and More
JetBrains recently released their award winning IDE, Intellij IDEA 9. It includes support for a whole suite of new technologies, improved support for existing features, improved performance and a more streamlined user interface.
-
Social Contracts Facilitate Team Commitment
Formalised social contracts provide a structure to help reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with organisational change, and can enable an Agile transition to go more smoothly. Israel Gat provides an example of the social contract he used at BMP Software.
-
Java EE 6 Features: Dependency Injection, Bean Validation and EJB Enhancements
The latest version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) offers several new features including dependency injection, bean validation and significant enhancements in EJB, Servlets, JSF, and JSP technologies. Java EE 6 version was released on Thursday. This article gives an overview of the new features in the latest release.
-
Teaching Games - Fun or Serious Business?
Michael McCullough and Don McGreal, creators of the Tasty Cupcakes teaching games website, have published an article on "Fun Driven Development." The economic downturn hasn't squeezed these games out of our training programs - in fact, they've become a staple where Agilists gather to exchange ideas. Here's a little history and some starting points for using games with your teams.
-
What do you do, Testing or Checking?
Software testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test. However, this definition does not talk about sapience which brings about a subtle difference between testing and checking. Michael Bolton talked about this difference and the reason why there should be a difference between the two.
-
Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.
-
Do We Need an "Agile Team Lead" Role?
Patrick Wilson-Welsh, Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, Daryl Kulak, and others are attempting to popularize the idea of a new role, the "Agile Team Lead", to supplant many of the existing leadership roles found in and around agile teams.
-
Code Contracts are Making Slow Progress
Code Contracts are making slow progress towards being ready for production use. While the technology still shows a lot of initial promise, it doesn’t take long to run into a road block or six that makes them unusable in their current form.
-
When Agile Success is Eventually a Failure
It is often assumed that once the pilot Agile teams are successful, the process of Agile adoption is on the right track. Dave Nicolette shares very intriguing insights into situations where the adoption failed even after very successful pilot implementations.
-
Individual Rewards on a Scrum Team
In a recent LinkedIn discussion the question was asked "Should we have an individual recognition reward on a Scrum team". This prompted some intense debate with points both for and against.
-
Software Katas - Practice in Public Makes Perfect
Thought leaders in the agile community are talking about software katas - where one practices specific exercises until they are memorized. Robert Martin has calls them "performance art". Lately there has been an increase in blog posts and sites devoted to katas. The latest addition: weekly screencasts at katas.softwarecraftsmanship.org.
-
System/Acceptance Testing with Time and Dates
Unit Testing Time and Dates is an often talked about problem with relatively simple solutions. More difficult is the acceptance/system testing with Time. What strategies are used?
-
Refactor or Rewrite?
The goal of refactoring and rewriting is to improve the sanity of the system by improving the code readability, structure and clarity. A clean code would be easier to maintain and enhance. However, on many occasions Agile teams have a tough time deciding between the two.