Kenai

Kenai is Sun’s connected developer destination. It is a integrated suite of developer services where you can host your open source projects. Currently the following features are supported:

  • Source Code Management (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git)
  • Issue Tracking (Jira and Bugzilla)
  • Wiki
  • Forums
  • Mailing Lists
  • Download facility for documents
  • Evolving integration with NetBeans

When you create an account at Kenai, you can host up to five projects for free. I imported two of my hobby projects to try it out, and I liked it. See wikipedia for a comparison of open source software hosting facilities.

JUnitMax

Kent Beck has released JUnitMax.

“JUnit Max is an Eclipse plug-in that helps programmers stay focused on coding by running tests intelligently and reporting results unobtrusively. Every time you save a Java file, Max will run your tests and report errors like compile errors. In addition, Max runs the tests most likely to fail first, so you only have to pay close attention to test results for a second (literally) before getting back to coding, even if you have a long-running test suite.”

Running tests in the background is nothing new. A continuous testing plugin for Eclipse has existed for a while. What is new here is the logic deciding in which order the tests should run. But I am not sure people are willing to pay $2/month for it. There are too many free tools out there… I will be waiting for the NetBeans plugin before i give it a try anyway…

SVNKit 1.2.2

After four weeks of vacation, it takes some time to get started again, but I will give it a try 🙂

Lately, I have been writing a couple of small applications integrating with different tools, such as ScrumWorks, Mantis and Jira. Now the time has come to Subversion. SVNKit 1.2.2 was released recently this year, so I had to try it out.

SVNKit is a pure Java toolkit that implements all Subversion features and provides APIs to work with Subversion from within your Java application. I have only had time to play around with the SVNRepository class so far. The API is pretty straigthforward and easy to use. For my use the performance is OK, but it is maybe a little slow if you have a user hanging over your shoulder waiting for response…

Integrating with ScrumWorks

In an earlier post, I wrote about ScrumWorks. After having used it on a couple of projects I have gathered some thoughts here.

I usually prefer the good old whiteboard with post-its or an Excel sheet to track progress and generate burndown charts. But ScrumWorks has proved to be an excellent alternative to these old techniques. Developers find it pretty easy to use, and ScrumMasters get a pleasent user interface and a nice burndown chart almost for free.

So what is the downside? Well, sooner or later you will be asked by management to report progress. And managers are usually not willing (or capable) to using any unfamiliar tools, so you end up exporting the data to make some burndown chart or excel sheet available for them. This type of status reporting is overhead (or waste in lean terminology) and boring.

Luckily, ScrumWorks has a decent Web Services API which makes it fairly easy to extract the information you want. For example generate live burndown charts automatically on a wiki, or use the task information in ScrumWork to verify valid commit comments in a Subversion hook script. Imagination is the only limit…

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stram Mapping has been around for years, but it is only recently that I started hearing about it in the context of software development. Maybe the renewed attention can get us to focus at the whole process rather than only the development part?

Nearly all projects I have either been involved in or heard of that claim they are using Scrum, are only using it for the development part of the process. The total process from an idea is born until it is in production usually consists of a gazillion boxes and arrows where the development part is one of the boxes. By optimizing this little box (for example by introducing Scrum), the process efficiency (if you are lucky) maybe increases from 4.0% to 4.1%…. Is this what we call sub-optimizing…?

Value Stream Mapping can help us optimize the parts that really gives impact and is an excellent tool for removing waste.

NetBeans 6.5

NetBeans 6.5 is now available for download at netbeans.org. I have been using the beta and release candidates for some time now, so there should not be too many surprises. The feature I am happiest about right now is that it is possible to configure projects independently. This enables me to push out code conventions in the root pom.xml file for the entire project. Hence there is no excuse for not following the conventions 🙂

Download NetBeans!

Mockito

If you are going to set up a completely new greenfield project, I would definately consider using Mockito as mock framework. It expressive and very intuitive, and results in less boilerplate code in your tests than for example EasyMock.

Very few of us are so lucky to be setting up a completely new project, but are stuck with legacy code that probably require more advanced features than those offered by Mockito. In this case I would probably go for a combination of EasyMock and PowerMock.

Jazz

I just had a look at the Jazz project and downloaded the latest version. I guess I am pretty slow since the Jazz Team Concert 1.0 Beta 2a was available a couple of weeks ago, but better late then never 🙂

The installation was easy. Instructions for server and client was comprehensive and pretty much straightforward so I had my test project up and running in less than half an hour.

Jazz is IBM Rational’s next-generation technology platform for collaborative software delivery. It is a collaboration platform for the full software lifecycle and absolutely worth take a closer look at.