In a recent post I talked about being pretty disappointed with Serena Dimensions and its lack of strictly command line options. It appeared that no matter what you did, you still had to enter your credentials through the GUI pop-up box. After reading through the 380+page command-line reference, I’m happy to report that I was…
Test-Driven Development of Data Access classes with Hibernate and HSQLDB
Recently I’ve been working on a project using Java and a technology called Gigaspaces. Being back in the Java world has been interesting, but thankfully many of the tools and approaches are similar. One aspect of our application (Ok, many, but we’ll pick one) is responsible for retrieving and storing information to a database. To…
Moving into Agile Architecture
Things are going to be interesting over the next couple of months. I guess that my new role is part of the architecture team. I’ve already had quite a rude awakening of how the industry has bastardized XP and Scrum (after somehow being sheltered by working in a great XP company, and then being onsite…
Extremely disappointed with Serena Dimensions
Before I joined my current job, they had just standardized on Serena Dimensions for the source control. In the past, I’ve used several different source control systems – CVS, Subversion, TFS, SourceSafe, etc. But I have never opened up a source control client and been utterly clueless as to how to get the files down….
Calculating differences using queries in DbFit
I’m doing a bunch of things over the next couple of weeks with FitNesse and DbFit, so I’ll be posting tips and tricks from the stuff I’m doing. Today I had to calculate that a specific amount was updated in the database. Since I’m writing characterization tests, I can’t just modify the database to make…
FitNesse DoFixtures and Gojko’s DbFit
Things have been kind of quiet on my front because of how crazy things have been at work. But in a good way. One of the things I’ve been doing is introducing FitNesse as an integral part of our strategy for capturing business rules and domain logic that isn’t really being captured anywhere. Currently I’m…
What is Agile?
Lately in the software industry, everywhere you turn you hear about "Agile". Its in the conferences, in the literature. You have Agile Modeling, Agile Software, Agile Requirements, Agile Architecture, and a whole host of acronyms that make your head spin. And then people start combining them (XP and CMMI! Scrum and XP! Scrum and CMMI!)….
Book Review: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
The term hackers has been quite sensationalized in today’s media. From movies depicting characters who break into electric substations using Ethereal to being able to do in-depth digital zooms and facial recognition with your cell phone, many of the so called "hackers" are miscategorized and just flat out wrong. In Hacking: The Art of Exploitation…
Agile FAQ is live!
Just a quick announcement that I’ve finally settled on a format for the Agile FAQ site. If you haven’t heard about it – this site came about from two incidents. The first was a post to the XP Yahoo! mailing list from a gentleman who I felt had the concepts of agile software development just…
Talking about a Revolution…
This week I realized that I just broke the 100,000 mile mark in my frequent flyer miles. Not bad for a year and a half of working for billg. It’s actually been a lot of fun, but the travel is brutal when you have two little girls and a loving wife just wondering when you…