Author Archives: Eric Lefevre-Ardant

About Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Independent technical consultant.

Visibly at work

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I made a quick video of a day of work at our client’s site.

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Agitar Presentation

Posted on November 21, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I have arranged a visit in Valtech by Agitar UK people last week. We had a presentation of AgitarOne (Agitator + Dashboard), their recently-released product. Frankly, the documentation and video presentations on their website do not give it justice: there … Continue reading →

Posted in java, test, valtech | Comments Off on Agitar Presentation

Java now partly Open-Sourced

Posted on November 13, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Sun has officially announced that the JVM and the compiler are now open-sourced, under the GPL license, no less. The API is to be open-sourced in 2007, too.

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Free Agile Seminar at Valtech Paris

Posted on November 8, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

My employer is organizing an Agile Seminar on the morning of December 5th, in Paris. Entrance is free. Keynotes will be given by a couple of VT guys I know and will be worth it. Note that most of the … Continue reading →

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Webcams with a remote team: should we give up?

Posted on October 24, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Considering that we are a distributed team (well, 80% offshore anyway), Craig Larman has been pushing for us to use webcams extensively. He suggested that each project manager for the project (one offshore, one onshore) should get one, and systematically … Continue reading →

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More about Open Space Technology

Posted on October 20, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I am getting more questions in the office about Open Space Technology. There are quite a lot of information on the web — once you know were to find it. I find this one a useful introduction. Though it describes … Continue reading →

Posted in openspace | 1 Comment

Taking notes visibly to everyone

Posted on October 16, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Something to keep in mind for the future: during CITCON, Joe used a projector to display his computer while he was taking notes on the same computer. In this way, anyone who shows up would have an idea of the … Continue reading →

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CITCON: The Culture of CI: Before Installing CruiseControl & Beyond Installing It

Posted on October 13, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I had suggested a topic covering “Beyond Installing CruiseControl – CI Culture with Management and Developers”. It actually got merged with “Social Impact of CI”, suggested by Michael, and “How to introduce CI”, from Jeffrey. Jeffrey had, in fact, a … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, continuous integration, openspace, test | 1 Comment

CITCON and random figures

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Mike from Atlassian was quite a vocal participant to CITCON. During the talk on CI Culture, he explained that the developers in his team were among the top 5%, but that they wanted to reach the top 1%. Someone then … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, openspace, test | 2 Comments

Freakonomics and Mass Observation

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I have just finished reading Freakonomics. It’s a great book, but it’s gone too fast! It took me about 3 days to complete it. Also, the authors are right to indicate early on that there is no real unifying topic. … Continue reading →

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CITCON and technical excellence

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I was generally impressed by what people seems to have put in place for Continuous Integration. Here is a list, from the top of my head: load testing; Douglas Squirrel from youDevise told how they were using CruiseControl to trigger … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, continuous integration, openspace, test | 2 Comments

CITCON: CI and offshore

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

At CITCON, I was quite happy to see one person suggest the topic “CI and offshore”, as I am involved on an offshore project myself. Unfortunately, this person didn’t show up, and just we were just 3 in the session. … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, offshore, openspace, test | 2 Comments

CITCON: Remote (Cruise)Control: Amazon EC2

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Someone at CITCON (I’m pretty sure it was Mike) had a really good idea: use the service offered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run CruiseControl. Basically, Amazon EC2 offers virtual machines where anything can be uploaded. No … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, continuous integration, test | 3 Comments

CITCON: Open Space Technology

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

At CITCON, there were no pre-arranged sessions with star presenters. To be sure, some participants to the conference were more renowned than others; some of them had even brought papers and presentations they had written that they thought might be … Continue reading →

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CITCON London 2006

Posted on October 8, 2006 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Here are my own pictures from the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, London 2006. Official website here. More pictures there, there and there.

Posted in agile, citcon, continuous integration, openspace, test | 5 Comments