Eric Lefevre-Ardant on Java & Agile

June 29, 2007

Telelogic to be acquired by IBM

Filed under: misc — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 10:02 am

I’ve just learned that Telelogic, one of my former employers, is to be acquired by IBM.

From 1998 till early 2000, I used to work for Verilog, a French software company (I was based in the Dallas office) that was doing pretty well with its IDE targeted at the SDL world. One fine day of December 1999, I arrived in the office, only to learn that Telelogic, the other major player in SDL, had acquired us. Telelogic was no worse, nor better that Verilog (though certainly more commercially aggressive), but I needed a change and in April, I went back to Europe and joined Valtech (in London for a few years, then Paris).

When we were at Verilog, we used to worry about Telelogic (which we thought was using disloyal means to take business from us), and also, though less, about Rational (for its real-time software IDE), i-Logix, and a few others.

Well, Telelogic snapped Verilog, then i-Logix (among others). IBM acquired Rational (among many others), and now Telelogic.

It’s a strange feeling to hear about a company you used to work for. It’s a bit like hearing about long-lost high school friends: how did they do? and, inevitably, did I do any better?

Every now and then, I come across people that used to work for Telelogic, including the project manager of my current consulting gig at EDF, and Pascal Roques, a UML guru and a colleague at Valtech (the proverbial small world).

A new technical blog at Valtech France

Filed under: valtech — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 9:05 am

Here at Valtech France, we have had an internal technical newsletter for a couple of years.

The articles are now available publicly online, just for you. Posts are in generally in French and address subjects such as Hudson, JSF, AgileOpen (contributed by yours truly), PMBOK, and much, much more.

As one of the skeptics that predicted two years ago that this newsletter wouldn’t last, I am impressed by the tenacity of David Gageot (the newsletter originator) and Romain Linsolas (the current maintainer), and of the sustained quality of the articles.

June 26, 2007

More annoying issues with WebServices

Filed under: java, webservices — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 4:26 pm

It seems that everyday, I find another reason to bash WebServices.

A few weeks ago, we were trying desperately to generate proper Java stubs out of an WDSL descriptor that was using return data described in XSD files. We eventually gave up. We now simply return Strings that contain XML formatted as per the XSDs.

Yesterday, I found a weird thing: I had two methods with the same parameters, but (obviously) different names. Apparently, when calling one from the WS client, the other would actually be called on the WS server… Even stranger: depending on some unknown circumstances, it would sometimes work fine.

Well, apparently, this is not a bug, this is a feature! I kid you not, check for yourself. Under the ‘literal’ style, method parameters are part of the signature, but not the method name! For this, you need to use the ‘wrapped’ style.

When oh when will this nonsense stop?

June 23, 2007

AgileOpen – Measuring Agile

Filed under: agile, conferences, openspace — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 12:11 pm

To my question “how can we demonstrate the validity of Agile using figures” the disappointing conclusion was that it was not actually possible (thank you Jamie and your “when you know, you know” ;-) ). For more on this, I’d like to refer you to the presentation Agile – Les chiffres pour convaincre (The Figures that Make a Convincing Case for Agile) from XP Day Paris, as well as the book Lean Software Development – An Agile Toolkit. These two documents explain how you can make more money when using Agile methods. This is not proving the validity of Agile from an engineering point of view, but it should still help!

Concerning measuring the ‘agile-ness’ of a team, Rachel Davies shown that she likes to identify the Agile practices that a team should use (such as Continuous Integration), and then give a mark from 0 to 10. If a team is given less than 10, she also adds what is missing to reach the highest mark (”the CI should run integration tests”). I must admit that, though simple to put in place, I am rather sceptical of this approach. It seems to ignore the fact that a truly Agile team should always try to do better, regardless of whatever mark they got.

A radar chart showing developers' appreciation of their project

One option presented at XP Day might help: the idea is to ask team members, at each iteration retrospective, to evaluate themselves their agile-ness on a 0 to 5 scale. After adding questions such as “how happy are you on this project?” and “how well do you feel we responded to business needs”, you end up with a good-looking radar chart that evolves in time. This is very appealing: it helps keep Agile in the mind of the team members, become more autonomous (no waiting for an external consultant to tell them the gospel), prevent the “checkbox list effect”… plus, it’s cheap to put in place!

My hand-written notes taken live are available in the Book of Proceedings.

June 20, 2007

XP Day Paris 2007: presentations now available online

Filed under: agile, conferences — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 11:03 am

Some of the presentations we saw at XP Day Paris 2007 are now available online (in French).

Some of those that I had commented on before include:

June 14, 2007

AgileOpen – Continuous Integration with Hudson

Filed under: agile, conferences, continuous integration, hudson, java, openspace — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 6:12 pm

After a session on Agile Tooling, I suggested a demo of Hudson. I thought that went rather well.

For me, Hudson is definitely the best CI tool today. It is still a bit young but it is so easy to use that it is a breeze to switch to it.

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AgileOpen – Agile Conference in French; Valtech Days

Filed under: agile, conferences, openspace — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 2:23 pm

There were 4 French people at AgileOpen, so inevitably the subject of holding the equivalent of AgileOpen in France came up.

It appeared that the people at Octo are using OpenSpace internally. They are also starting to apply it with clients.

As for Valtech, we have of course been using OpenSpace internally for a while now. And our next big thing is the one-day long OpenSpace event will take place during the Valtech Days, on October 24th (watch this space).

Apparently, there are also rumors of people organizing a French edition of AgileOpen, but there is much to do before that to happen.

AgileOpen – Games for Agile teams

Filed under: agile, conferences, openspace — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 2:11 pm

In the evening, there was a session called ‘games’. That was interesting (and fun). A number of games were named.

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AgileOpen – Agile Retrospectives

Filed under: agile, conferences, openspace, retrospectives — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 12:10 pm

Agile RetrospectivesI have to thank Diana Larsen for bringing the subject of Retrospectives up. I am very interested in them, but have little experience outside the usual Scrum retrospectives so I was very happy that someone of the caliber of Diana was willing to share her experience.

Many things to take away here, all coming directly from Diana’s mouth.

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AgileOpen – Back from AO Europe 2007

Filed under: agile, conferences, openspace, valtech — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 10:39 am

The agendaJust came back from Hilversum, Netherlands, where AgileOpen Europe 2007 took place.

See all the pictures I took on Flickr. Many other photos here.

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June 8, 2007

Maven: The plugin ’standard maven plugin’ does not exist or no valid version could be found

Filed under: java, maven — Eric Lefevre-Ardant @ 11:47 am

A week ago, Maven started shouting “The plugin ‘org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-war-plugin’ does not exist or no valid version could be found”. What the…?! how can “maven-war-plugin” not exist?? Besides, it is in my repository!

As it turns out, it is a reasonably common issue. I managed to find some help on codehaus’ site, and it did help. But not every time.

Eventually, the best solution seems to simply delete the local repository and let Maven repopulate it.

From what I understand, it sometimes happens that some files (maybe the maven-metadata-central.xml ones?) get corrupted. Good luck when that happens on a enterprise-wide repository…

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