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Engine Yard Releases Cloud Management Framework Vertebra
Vertebra, announced at RailsConf 2008, has finally been released. Vertebra is a platform to develop and manage cloud applications. We talked to Engine Yard founder and architect Jayson Vantuyl about what Vertebra and its use of XMPP bring to the table.
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Example Driven Acceptance Testing
Unit and Integration testing often get more importance in Agile teams as compared to acceptance testing. Gojko Adzic and Lisa Crispin suggest approaches to efficiently include acceptance tests as a part of development.
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Eclipse PHP Development Toolset 2.0 released
The Eclipse Foundation has announced the immediate availability of PDT 2.0, a major upgrade to the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools project. PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications.
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The Qualities of a Software Architect
The software/enterprise architect job is an important one. The duties of an architect are numerous and require specific leadership, communication and technical skills to be fulfilled.
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JavaPassion Speaker Offers Free JavaFX Programming Online Training
The popular online Java training website Java Passion host Sang Shin has a new free online training course on JavaFX technology. The first session of this course will start on January 30. The presentation slides of first session are already available on the website.
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Sandcastle’s Team Manager Dismisses Rumors About Project Termination
To dismiss any rumors about the termination of the Sandcastle project, Anand Raman, Group Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division, has posted an update on the current status of the project. Sandcastle is a tool used for generating MSDN-like documentation by reflecting over the source code of a .NET project.
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Venkat Subramaniam on Facts and Fallacies of Everyday Software Development
Software development is challenging and lot of fun, but there are several factors that interrupt teams from succeeding in IT projects. These are usually not tools or technologies but it is the people that affect the success of software projects. In a keynote presentation at the recent CodeMash 2009 conference, Venkat Subramaniam talked about facts and fallacies of everyday software development.
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Pair Programming vs. Code Review
Pair programming and code review are each practices that improve the quality of software, as well as promote knowledge sharing. When the agile vs. lean, XP vs. Scrum, and vi vs. Emacs debates get slow, developers have been known to debate the merits of pair programming vs. code review. Theodore Nguyen-Cao described code reviewers as chickens, and paired programmers as pigs.
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Presentation: Kent Beck: Trends in Agile Development
In this presentation, Kent Beck, the father of eXtreme Programming, shows the synergies between business and Agile development. The reason Agile is becoming more popular every day is because it responds to the business needs as they evolve.
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Interview: Jay Phillips on Adhearsion and VoIP
In this interview recorded at RubyFringe, Jay Phillips talks about VoIP, Asterisk and how his framework Adhearsion makes it easy to write voice applications.
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Presentation: Testing is Overrated
In this talk from RubyFringe, Luke Francl asks: is developer-driven testing really the best way to find software defects? Or is the emphasis on testing and test coverage barking up the wrong tree?
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First Kanban Conference
First annual Lean Kanban Process and Practices will be held in Miami, Florida, May 6-8th and featuring keynotes from Dean Leffingwell, Alan Shalloway and David Anderson. The other speakers include most of the players in Kanban movement (Corey Ladas, Karl Scotland, Eric Landes et al.).
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Agile For Embedded Systems
Some might say that agile development and embedded software (ie. "software supporting a hardware device") do not mix well. Mark Levison has taken some time to assemble and writeup a resource reference of people, experiences, and advice that help to show otherwise.
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Over-Commitment Versus Over-Delivery
A major goal of sprint planning is to make a commitment to what is intended to be delivered by the end of the sprint. However, many teams either over-commit or over-deliver. Both situations are considered as smells and lead to lack of predictability along with other related pitfalls. The team is required to walk a fine line between the two.
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Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."