Blog Insights

ThoughWorks Studios has released an ebook titled "How do you estimate on an Agile project?" where they explore common approaches and their adaptions from real-world projects.  The book is comprised of several authors, most notably Martin Fowler. In this ebook they discuss why teams estimate, different methods that teams use...

Over the last year or so software development estimates have become a popular topic.  The popularity stems from the inherent fact that estimating software development is difficult.  Some people are writing about ways to improve your estimates while others are writing about how to manage software development without estimates. Those writing...

Now we will cover the fun stuff for which we've been waiting. In this post, I'll go over how to setup Sonar for a Java project that utilizes Ant for its build.  I'll go through the basic steps for installing and running a Sonar instance, and how to use a...

Do you sometimes feel like your team spends more time documenting your system than building it?  One of the biggest hindrances to progress in a software project is documentation. The Agile Manifesto prescribes that teams should value working software over comprehensive documentation. It doesn’t mean that you should not create documentation;...

Please note that wherever required I'll be using the Apache Abdera project from the nemo instance to illustrate some features and functionality available in Sonar. To find the Apache Abdera project you can do one of the followings: Sonar and its metrics are about improving the code quality. That is, they are for positive...

If you haven’t heard of Git or don’t understand why you should use it, checkout the talk given by the author to Google (Torvalds, 2007). Git is an excellent version control tool for agile software development. But many of us may not have the luxury of using Git because our company has...

One of the biggest hindrances to progress in software projects is bureaucracy. Rigorous processes that must be followed unswervingly, deliverables changing hands between independent groups and required approvals – hand-offs, sign-offs, and stand-offs – all get in the way of software projects making valuable progress. So how would you change...

I want to share an experience that my colleague, Travis Klotz, and I ran into recently. I was trying to manually test a Java web application running in debug mode.  It was running really slow, taking several minutes to launch after the compile was finished.  And when it did eventually start,...

How many times have you been presented with a phone book-sized printout of ambiguous yet carefully crafted requirements?  How many times have you, swamped with remaining work and short of time, camped in your cubical to meet a looming deadline?  Or seen your customers paralyzed by an approval process out...

In my last post on Camel, I spent some time introducing you two of its biggest players, the Context and the Route, by means of a simple problem - processing data coming in via file. If all we had to do was move the file, we could call our job...