Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron, was released last week. I eagerly upgraded to see if my previous wireless networking issues had been resolved, and joy of joys they had! This allowed me to finally switch back to Ubuntu as my primary development environment. Most of the switch went without a hitch, however I did [...]

For many years, step 2 has eluded the slashdot community: 1: Start your project. 2: … 3. Profit! Now, however, Ext, the company behind the popular ExtJS Javascript library, seem to believe they have pinned down this step. In the latest 2.1 release, Ext has switched from a dual LGPL/commercial license model to a dual GPL/commercial license...

For many years, step 2 has eluded the slashdot community: 1: Start your project. 2: … 3. Profit! Now, however, Ext, the company behind the popular ExtJS Javascript library, seem to believe they have pinned down this step. In the latest 2.1 release, Ext has switched from a dual LGPL/commercial license model to a dual GPL/commercial license...

A major focus of agile development is fast feedback - of many kinds. As this idea is taken to its extreme, it is worthwhile asking if feedback can be too fast. That is, is there a point at which shrinking the feedback loop becomes counterproductive? The benefit of feedback is knowing if you are [...]

A major focus of agile development is fast feedback - of many kinds. As this idea is taken to its extreme, it is worthwhile asking if feedback can be too fast. That is, is there a point at which shrinking the feedback loop becomes counterproductive? The benefit of feedback is knowing if you are [...]

As our new acceptance test suite for Pulse 2.0 has grown, naturally it has taken longer to execute. More problematicly, however, several tests towards the end of the suite were taking longer and longer to run. This clearly highlighted a scalability issue: as more data was piled into the testing installation, tests took [...]

As our new acceptance test suite for Pulse 2.0 has grown, naturally it has taken longer to execute. More problematicly, however, several tests towards the end of the suite were taking longer and longer to run. This clearly highlighted a scalability issue: as more data was piled into the testing installation, tests took [...]

As a part of our continued efforts to support every unit testing library we can in Pulse, I have been looking into CUnit, the imaginitively-named framework for plain C. Initial Impressions The first thing I noticed about CUnit was the clean website and full documentation. This is a rarity amongst the C-based libraries I have seen, [...]

As a part of our continued efforts to support every unit testing library we can in Pulse, I have been looking into CUnit, the imaginitively-named framework for plain C. Initial Impressions The first thing I noticed about CUnit was the clean website and full documentation. This is a rarity amongst the C-based libraries I have seen, [...]

Checked exceptions is one of those Java features that tends to work up a lively discussion. So forgive me for rehashing an old debate, but I am dismayed to see continued rejection of them as a failed feature, and even more so to see proposals to remove them from the language (not that I [...]

Checked exceptions is one of those Java features that tends to work up a lively discussion. So forgive me for rehashing an old debate, but I am dismayed to see continued rejection of them as a failed feature, and even more so to see proposals to remove them from the language (not that I [...]

Ben Rady’s recent blog post Continuous Integration Is A Hack always had a title that would attract the attention of someone working on this said “hack”. One core part of Ben’s argument is that: Agility is a set of values and principles…and no more. Practices depend on technology and technique, which can (and...

Ben Rady’s recent blog post Continuous Integration Is A Hack always had a title that would attract the attention of someone working on this said “hack”. One core part of Ben’s argument is that: Agility is a set of values and principles…and no more. Practices depend on technology and technique, which can (and...

Speed up your tests by writing more tests? No, I haven’t gone insane, there is a clear distinction between the two types of tests: Acceptance tests verify the functionality of your software at the users level. In our case these tests run against a real Pulse package which we automatically unpack, setup and exercise [...]

Speed up your tests by writing more tests? No, I haven’t gone insane, there is a clear distinction between the two types of tests: Acceptance tests verify the functionality of your software at the users level. In our case these tests run against a real Pulse package which we automatically unpack, setup and exercise [...]