Interesting Bits

Annoying the Pig

I apologize for the "me, too" entry today, but I think it's worth it. See this for details.

JUnit Recipes has shipped!

I just received copies of my book, JUnit Recipes, in the mail today. I really like the look of it: the colors are more muted than they'd looked in electrons, and I'm a fan of softer colors. It's a big volume - slightly larger than Rapid Development but not as large as the "Jukebox" book on Swing. I am proud of being able to write that much good stuff on a topic, and I hope my readers will see it that way, too. I would like to thank Scott Stirling for contributing two important chapters (5 and 7, so you can congratulate him separately) and my reviewers for making the book better than it would have been were I left to my own devices.

Making good teams even better

In my travels I run into a number of people in software who enjoy telling me stories about what they see in the industry. Recently a colleague told me about a team at his company who had called in a trainer to teach them about test-first programming and incremental design. When I asked about the trouble the team was in, he replied, "No trouble. They were already the most productive software team in the company. They just decided that they could benefit from going even faster."

Even productive teams benefit from learning new practices, and from practice itself.

Subversion troubles: SVN+SSH=PITA

I have abandoned running Subversion on my Red Hat Linux 9.0 box in tunneling mode using SSH. I don't know what the problem is, but since it's not a critical configuration for me at present, I have gone back to running a simple svnserve on a Windows server on my local network.

The reason? This morning, for the second or third time, I got this: Connection closed unexpectedly, which causes my repository to need to be recovered, and I decided I'd had enough for now. The nice folks on the Subversion mailing lists think it's an SSH layer problem, and I'm inclined to believe them. In the meantime, to avoid the problem, I'm back to Windows. That means that my server is not accessible from the outside world right now, but I'll live.

Later, when I have more patience and a greater need, I'll get it up and working again. Pointers to HOWTO documentation are appreciated.

Subversion for CVS users: Multiple repositories

I have been switching from CVS to Subversion, now that the latter has attained full v1.0 status. Along the way, there are always headaches. Today's lesson has to do with the difference between CVS modules and a Subversion repository.

A fresh, new look!

Just a quick announcement: we have redesigned our site. Come and have a look!

From CVS to Subversion

Last night I started making the switch from CVS to Subversion.

If you're not familiar with it, Subversion is a would-be replacement for CVS that fixes many of the problems with CVS. No more losing history when you move a file. No more clogging the repository with empty, abandoned directories. Tree-wide revisioning on every commit, and not just when you tag a module. Decent Eclipse integration.

I'll talk about my experiences here, starting with how I got started...

Software Process Improvement

I recommend reflecting on the content of this presentation.

Building Bugs in Double-Quick Time, part 1

In a recent Yahoo! group posting, I came across an article entitled Building Bugs in Double-Quick Time. In summary, the article presents a view of the current state of the software development industry, asking the (by now) old question, "We don't tolerate this level of incompetence in other industries, so why do we tolerate it in software?" I would like to take some time to address the varying points in this article over several upcoming weblog entries.