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;...

What we covered so far ? In my previous post, I covered the reasons why software quality metrics should be collected and why improvements to the code should be made based on those metrics. In this post I’ll be illustrating how Sonar can fulfill the job of collecting metrics and...

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...

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...

Over the weekend I decided to play around with the new html5 element canvas. The canvas allows you to paint images in the browser that previously was done with flash. Canvas is fairly straight forward and only requires a basic knowledge of html and javascript. I decided a good start would be to try and make...

Recently I was asked to make a bot for a local user group. The bot would simply report new events into the topic of an IRC channel. After the bot was created I decided to write an article about it and publish the code. The code and article  can be found here: http://www.dsmwebgeeks.com/2012/09/creating-an-irc-bot-stephen-dunn/ Basically the bot...

At home and at work, I find that the things that I have to do over and over are the most painful. At home, it’s the dishes; at work, it reading data out of a file or doing Hibernate mappings. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to escape...