Just a quick reminder, if you planned on going after one of the shirts, today's your last day. Here's the original post.

Andy Hunt gave a talk Thursday night in Reston, Virginia called Refactoring Your Wetware. I got a chance to review the slides before he went and it got me thinking... sounded like it would be a great talk by the way! Some developers let their company put them in a niche. They learn so much of the company's internal technology that they lose...

I saw a great quote on Justin's blog. So, I guess what I’m saying is, Agile Development works for books as well as for software. Get the product in front of readers early and often, and they’ll work with you to make the perfect product. Deliver once, at the end, and there are bound to be problems, and lots of unhappy customers who, rightfully,...

I read a great entry today on Steve Freeman's blog titled Steve was quoting Kent Beck, apparently from XP2005 As Kent likes to point out these days, the only thing you can really change is yourself, so doing the best job you can is the only available response; the rest is out of scope. There's a lot of wisdom in those words. You are responsible...

Okay, after that inflammatory comment got your attention... :) JUnit is a ~testing~ framework. There is nothing in the framework that limits it's use to only unit testing. Given the name of JUnit, NUnit, MBUnit, and others, perhaps unit testing was the original motivation, but don't limit your use of a great tool. If you're not using an XUnit...

Those of you who've read Ship It! know about the book's key practices poster. And you may have also visited the Ship It! CafePress store. I decided to merge the two ideas. :) Look over the key practices poster and let me know which practice you like the best. Include a sentence or two about why you like it. If anything in the book (or the...

If Dave is hip for getting a Rails podcast interview, then Will and I must be hip too! ;) Who-da-thunk-it? We were interviewed by Mike Riley (for Software Development Magazine) who had some great questions about Ship It!. We talked about things like Tumbleweed Developers, Continuous Integration, and The List. It won't be published for a few...

This is a short article and introduction to JUnit and several other frameworks, including JTiger, TestNG, and the next version of JUnit. It's a good article if you've got the time. Test Framework Comparison by Justin Lee.

Time and again I hear people say that their problem is too complicated to solve cleanly. The reason their solution is so messy? It's because the problem requires it! This is, of course, just silliness. Your problem may be difficult. Your timeline may be too short. But you've got to realize that a messy solution is going to cost you needless...

Both Will and I are hanging out in the Process forum of JavaRanch the first week of August as a book promotion. We'll answer questions about the book from August second to the fifth. Come by and ask a few questions and JavaRanch might pick you to win a free book! If you've never visited JavaRanch, it's a great Java resource with very active...

Hi all. A co-worker of mine at SAS is participating in a triathlon to raise money for cancer research. Please visit the web site and if you choose not to support Laura, support your local chapter. Greetings! Scott Greene, my husband Tim's business partner and dear friend, is fighting non-hodkins lymphoma. Tim shaved his head.... which I won't...

I saw Eric Armstrong's blog this morning. He posted about a new tool called Jackpot that I'm not sure about just yet. It would have a great deal more value to me if it was being created as an Ant task instead of NetBeans module, but that's another story. :) What caught my eye was a story he told about why you'd want to automate. The story is...

Here's a thought... what are the habits of the most effective developers you know? I know a handful of people that I consider really good. I'm sure you do as well. What are their habits that stand out to you? I learned the habit of always keeping a priorized list of my work from one of these people. That idea morphed into what I now call The...

Mike was kind enough to read Ship It! and post a review on his blog. Here's the link if you missed it and a short exerpt as well. ...What I love about this book is that I can hand it to any developer or manager and know that the advice is relevant to their project. It doesn't matter if they're already using a formal process or they have no...

In an ideal world, every class in your software product would have unit tests. Mock Client Tests would validate every usage scenario. You'd catch every break in your product in minutes with your Continuous Integration system and the developer who changed the code would fix the problem quickly. But we don't live in a perfect world, do we? We...