Just from this morning, on the Lean Development mailing list.
The problem with roles – ANY roles – is that they tend to become a laundry list of stuff a person is expected to do, instead of a checklist that a team is responsible for looking into.
I am proud to announce the availability of Planet Valtech, our syndication page for blogs written by my fellow consultants.
This site aggregates mostly blogs from consultants at Valtech France. However, I have also added Dave Nicolette‘s (from Valtech US), as well as the official blogs from Valtech France, Valtech Germany and Valtech US. Many posts are in French, but roughly every other post is in English.
The site is nothing special, so you’ll probably want to subscribe to the consolidated RSS feed.
Not happy with all RSS goodness? well, you can complain to me, I am waiting for you ;-)
I am looking the latest version of Weblogic as a replacement for our aging Weblogic 8.1.4 installation.
I first downloaded Weblogic Server 10.3 Technology Preview, anticipating that we would take a while before actually deploying it, and that BEA who come soon with the final version. So far, so good.
Then, just yesterday, I heard that Oracle had released a version of Weblogic, the first since they acquires BEA back in January (April, if you count the approval of the European Commission). I thought it was a good time to upgrade to the latest stable version.
Well, surprise, surprise. For a start, the main Weblogic page on Oracle’s site does not mention a version number. If you reach the download page, it mentions a ‘version 10.0 MP1’. I thought it was a weird numbering system (after all, it should have been 10.3 final, or at least 10.2, which, as I gather, was released in April 2008), reminiscent of Sun’s.
Alas, when I tried to install, the installer clearly stated it was really version 10.0, and only the BEA name appeared (the administration console also has no mention of the Oracle name).
Clearly, not only they had failed to rebrand even the installer, but they managed to released an obsolete version. This is not reassuring.
As a side note, the left-hand panel on the Weblogic console 10.3 TP (I didn’t reached the point where I could play with the console with Oracle Weblogic 10.0 MP1) does not seem to work with Firefox 3 (it is not clickable). It works fine with FF 2 and IE 6, though.
This is starting to seem like a lot of small problems that could have been avoided.
Update (16/07/08): there never was a version 10.2, nor a 10.1, for Weblogic Server. I got mixed-up with Weblogic Portal. So the update on v10.0 is 10.3. So my anger was partly misplaced. Of course, a consistent numbering system would have helped…
These days, I have had the opportunity to think more about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) with tools such as JBehave, RSpec, TestDox, and Test-Driven Requirements (TDR) with tools such as Fit, FitNesse, GreenPepper, Concordion. Here are my conclusions.
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After a pointer by Jérôme Piétri, a colleague of mine at Valtech, I have had a look at RichNesse, a WYSIWYG interface for editing pages under Fitnesse. It is based on FCKEditor. All in all, I am impressed.
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The Conference on Continuous Integration & Testing, Asia edition, is tomorrow! I wish I could be there, but the plane ticket is unhelpfully expensive :-(
Well, I’ll have to make up by going to CITCON Amsterdam in October! Who’s joining me?
Cobertura and Maven: There are TWO important things to do. Then, we’ll see about integrating Cobertura and Hudson.
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Readers to this blog know that I take every opportunity to talk about Hudson, one of the very best Continuous Integration tools. Well, I have another very good reason: you can contribute to it and make money, at least if you let yourself known before the end of June.
I have originally had a look at Scrum and XP From the Trenches around 2 years ago, I think. It seemed to be good, but too long, so I barely scrape the surface.
Recently, I have had a longer look into it, and there is now no doubt that it is a great document. Continue reading
The French translation of Hudson is a contribution I have made to the project. The work is complete for the core part of Hudson, and I consider it stable, though many bits are not internationalized, hence appear in English.
What can you do if you want to help?
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I first wrote the title of this post in the form “how small should the stories be?”, leading to the apparently obvious answer: “as small as possible”. It is in fact slightly more complex. Continue reading
A journalist from Journal Du Net interviewed me a couple of weeks ago on the tools and (agile) practices we use at Valtech. Continue reading
That’s what you get when you spend several days polishing a post. Unlike what I suggested in my previous post from today, Sun does seem to take action regarding Hudson. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Hudson creator, has just been promoted to working on Hudson full-time. I’m jealous ;-)
Congratulations, Kohsuke! You deserve it.
I thought it’d be interesting to look at some download statistics for Hudson and CruiseControl, probably the 2 OpenSource CI tools with the most mindshare currently.
Want to know more about CruiseControl, Hudson, and other CI tools? Meet the creators, contributers and users at the next CITCON conference in Melbourne, June 27th & 28th. Cannot make it to Melbourne? Then CITCON Amsterdam, October 3 & 4 is for you (I know I‘ll be there). Or CITCON Minneapolis, April 17 & 18, 2009.
In preparation to our holiday trip in Indonesia planned for August, I’ve taken to read stories and legends about Hinduism and Buddhism (though a Muslim country for 90% of the population, Indonesia is the host of Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world). The legends I’ve been reading contain striking similarities between Buddhism and the Toyota Way, which I have also recently read about. Indeed, those similarities are striking.
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