Friday 7 November 2008

When Agile goes wrong

I've just read this post:
When Agile goes wrong.

When I first started working with agile, I have to say I came across a lot of this behaviour, and was bilwildered why anyone would want to use it. However since (over the last 2 years) reading a lot about this subject and being exposed to some successful agile projects, I'd use it all the time now.

Come on people, don't cherry pick the bits you like, and the bits you think might get accepted, use it fully, and reap the benefits.

Friday 24 October 2008

Scrumy!

I was looking around this morning for more scrum software, and I came across scrumy. This appears to be a really basic piece of scrum software, that may just be enough to "just work". This may be better than the stickys I yesterday. I know it supports burndown, which is really useful, although it breaks all taks to 3 hours, which is editable.

Thursday 23 October 2008

Online stickys

I've been looking for something that might help me with Scrum over a distributed team, and still using sticky notes - they really work. Especially when you take into account "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". People find things easier to follow when a tool is easy to use.

So anyway, the point? Well I found what seems to me the best online sticky site I've seen:

http://linoit.com

I'm going to try this out on the next new Scrum I start with experienced agile devs. I'm hoping this will take some of the pain out of distributed teams. After all, I've tried photos and webcams; they just haven't worked for me or the teams.

A couple of interesting links on Agile

Not much time right now, but I've just read:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/iterating-for-knowledge - which is about iterating for knowledge, which I think is as important as iterating for business value. Both have their place, but I know it's a good idea to allow knowledge gathering. After all, the idea of just getting the project out the door with little or no effort, seems a great plan, but could lead to frustration in development teams.

I've not had a chance to go through: http://www.acceptancetesting.info/resources/ yet, but it looks quite interesting as it cover a lot about agile acceptance testing.

Monday 6 October 2008

I'm still looking at web services

Today, while I've been working with webservice, and spring, I came across this very good site:

http://wheelersoftware.com/index.jsp

He really seems to know his stuff.

Still working with Apache's CXF is a challenge as there doesn't really appear to be a ton of information on it out there. Especially when trying to use it to use Spring for WS-RM.

Ho hum....

Wednesday 17 September 2008

Firefox extension of the day... Poster

I've been playing with some soap services where I know what's expected to be sent, but I don't have any WSDL to write a client against... so for testing purposes Poster has already become invaluable, and can be found here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2691

It allows you to post and get http content... everytime I've wanted to do that in the past, I've needed to write my own, which I've then got rid of as it served it's breif purpose.

Tuesday 16 September 2008

WSAS and Eclipse Integration

So, I've been playing with the WSO-WSAS server today - I don't really understand it, but whilest following the tutorial here: http://wso2.org/library/2839 to get it working I discovered the following things you need to do to make it work... for me anyway.

Firstly I needed to change the default Java Compiler Eclipse uses to 1.5...

Then I got the following error when trying to create a new project:
Runtime "WSO2 WSAS" is invalid. Missing classpath entry \serverRootDirectory\lib.

The fix meant changing the: org.wso2.wsf.ide.server.wsas-2.3.jar file so the ServerRootDirectory are correct. This needed to be hard coded into wsas.serverdef file (extract the jar, and edit the file) in the "property id=serverRootDirectory" setting. It ended up looking something like this:
<property id="serverRootDirectory"
label="Runtime Directory"
type="directory"
context="runtime"
default="D:/opt/wso2wsas-2.3" />


I now have a project that works, but that doesn't mean I like it.