“How long would it take your organization to deploy a change that involves
just one single line of code?” (Mary Poppendiecks)
Let's see why it is important to shorten the deployment pipeline, automated
tests included.
Saturday 23 June 2012
Shorten the deployment pipe part 1: create a model and find the bottlenecks
By Vincent on Saturday 23 June 2012, 23:57
Saturday 16 June 2012
A devop dream: environment on demand
By Vincent on Saturday 16 June 2012, 15:44
If your software development teams has developed some automated functional tests, you might want to enforce a rule:
don't allow commits to the source control repository if any of the
functional tests is failing.
This will help isolating the issues and facilitate troubleshooting. One issue is the creation of bottlenecks. Bottlenecks happen when developers can't commit and are waiting for the build to be fixed.
The solution resides in having one environment per commit:
- every commit triggers a deployment that runs the whole automated tests suite
- every code change can be monitored as it is isolated from the others
TDD (Test Driven development) training with SoftEd Australia
By Vincent on Saturday 16 June 2012, 15:20
A few weeks ago, I attended a test driven development training with my colleagues. The instructor was from SoftEd.
This post does not intend to do a full review of the training but just give you an overview:
- we all thought we knew TDD, but we all learn something
- having the training in-house is an excellent idea. That way you can do some pair-programming with your colleagues
- the instructor will walk you through exercices that you would not do by yourself, on your free time: they are annoying. But in a good way! By repeating the same tasks, over and over again, you learn how to get better
- the training was a bit short because we could skip the automation testing and continuous integration part. Not much we learnt here, but it's always good to share experiences
- I do feel confident I can write my tests first and my code after
- I know and understand the value of TDD and I could myself help someone understand the benefits and the process
If you know what is TDD but you've never actually done it, this is a good training!
On commit VS on schedule AUAT (Automated acceptance testing)
By Vincent on Saturday 16 June 2012, 14:06
Should AUAT tests be run for each code commit or should they run
continuously, for instance every hour ?
The obvious answer seems to be: only if there is a new code commit, run the
unit tests and then the automated user acceptance testing. No need to run the
automated tests every hour.
The truth is, this might not be the best thing to do. Let see why.
Note: the image has nothing to do with the topic, but this is what I found when I searched for AUAT in google images. I thought I would keep the image, I kind of like it...
Wednesday 14 September 2011
Embed ActiveMQ and expose over TCP in Mule 3.1 (Spring config)
By Vincent on Wednesday 14 September 2011, 01:21
In this post we will describe how you can embed ActiveMQ in Mule. ActiveMQ is a well known solution and seems to integrate very well with Mule.
However it looks like up to date documentation is missing and, to be honest, I struggled a bit to accomplish this integration. here we are using Mule 3.1 (based on Spring 3.x) and Apache ActiveMQ 5.5.0.
Thursday 10 February 2011
Database schema synchronisation with RedGate
By Vincent on Thursday 10 February 2011, 07:45
If you are in the process of setting up a continuous integration system, you might be wondering how to deploy your databases changes to your target environments. It's not an easy question to answer at first. Databases are not really files, neither code.
You could write migration scripts by hand and run them against the environment. It works, this is for instance what I was doing with Ruby On Rails and Capistrano deployment tool. It's is just not so "safe". Conflicts can be detected if you put your migrations files under source control. However it's very difficult to keep track of the version of your database schema and your code. When building you have to make sure you migrate to the right revision for the code you will deploy.
Today I want to do the same with Hudson (our continuous integration server)
on Microsoft SQL servers, and avoid the writing of migration scripts. The
solution is actually to put your database schema under version control, using
SVN for example. Then, your schema becomes files and directories. This means
you can manage versions, see the history, rollback, detect and resolve
conflicts and so forth.
Watin: The requested resource is in use
By Vincent on Thursday 10 February 2011, 06:42
Watin is a tool to run automated user acceptance testing by launching different browser like IE, Firefox to browse your web application. I use it conjointly with Spec-Flow, a kind of Cucumber implementation for .Net.
Using Watin on Windows server 2008 and you end up with that very annoying error from time to time:
Exception Source: Interop.SHDocVw Exception Type:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException Exception Message: The requested
resource is in use. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800700AA) Exception
Wednesday 2 February 2011
Google is the Agile?
By Vincent on Wednesday 2 February 2011, 23:14
Wednesday the 9th of February. 5.30pm @ 347 Kent St Sydney.
I'll probably be there with other people from the company I'm working for. It's been a while since I went to an Agile/Scrum meetup. In fact the last one was sponsored by my company (Agile Open Space and Social - booze, pizza, prizes). We had to elect a winner for the Adrenaline prize!! And, it was great, amazing open space concept!!
Here is the description, simple Copy/Past from meetup.com
"Please come and join Google's Dhanji R. Prasanna while he compares his current project to several of the popular agile markers and asks "is this agile?".
Here are some of his observations:
- We don't use stories
- Features can't always be user-centric
- We don't talk about spikes or iteration planning
- We don't have stakeholders, or even a board
- We don't do estimation or points or scoring"
Sunday 23 January 2011
Sitecore, WCMS, the certification program
By Vincent on Sunday 23 January 2011, 19:36
This week I attended the Sitecore training program: Sitecore developer
fundations. Maybe you've never heard of it, but Sitecore is one of the world
leader Web CMS at Enterprise level.
It's a powerful solution. You can do pretty much everything, in 10 different
ways. Meaning, you might end up with a dirty solution if your developers are
not using some kind of best practices.
The target audience for this training was:
Sunday 16 January 2011
.Net developers, champions in bad practices ?
By Vincent on Sunday 16 January 2011, 19:06
Let me be very clear. My background is Php, Java and Ruby On Rails. Some
time ago, I started to have a closer look at .Net development for an
assignment. I went through a few books that were recommended on some
forums.
I tried my best to convince myself that .Net can be a powerful solution for
Enterprise level application. Well, may be ... But to be honest, I think C# is
a bad copy of Java as a language. It's not even easy to read. But worse, I now
think that .Net developers are 10 years late in best practice in terms of Web
development. Tell me I'm wrong, please ..
I came across this in a book that was edited in 2010:
Sunday 9 January 2011
Modern India
By Vincent on Sunday 9 January 2011, 05:29
During my last trip in India, last December, I was pleasantly surprised by
how modern is this country. I didn't have this feeling the first time I came,
in 2009. May be the cultural clash made me blind.
Here is a post with a few pictures. I let you decide: India, modern or not ?
Thursday 8 July 2010
Log Rails production data to perform some audit (BI)
By Vincent on Thursday 8 July 2010, 02:50
We want to keep track of production data of a Rails app, so that we can analyse them in a few months.
To be more precise, we have a few data Models with a "status" and dates column that can change frequently. The idea is to write somewhere a new line in a DB or log file every time the status or any other attribute changes. These line consists in a copy of all the attributes for this object.
I see different solutions:
- using observer with after_save, and replicate the saved data to a reporting Mysql Db
- using a logger system.
- do it a different level, on the DB level, detecting changes in a table and copying the affected rows to the reporting DB.
It's easier to extract data then if they are stored in a DB. Log files are faster and don't slow down the process that much. I decided to go for the log files solution, using FasterCSV.
Sunday 4 July 2010
Ubuntu Rails
By Vincent on Sunday 4 July 2010, 20:33
If you want a simple recipe to install the Rails environment on Ubuntu, this article is for you. Just follow the steps, and you'll have everything ready to start coding.
We will install together the basics components, used by most people, like Mysql, Mongrel, RMagick.
Sunday 27 June 2010
Quelle solution de technologie Web ? Php, Java, .Net, Rails, Python ?
By Vincent on Sunday 27 June 2010, 15:05
Post in French, sorry, no translation in English.
Quel est la meilleure technolologie de developement Wb ? Existe-il une
reponse a cette question ?
Saturday 19 June 2010
Next Yow! nights
By Vincent on Saturday 19 June 2010, 20:35
Next YOW! meeting in Sydney is on the 6th of July. Speakers:
Pam Fox, Google Google APIs: A-Z Over the past 4 years that I've worked at
Google, we've gone from offering 8 APIs to offering 80, and our offerings cover
everything from the open-sourced Android SDK to the just-released Google Fonts
API, targeting everyone from web developers to research scientists. In this
talk, I will attempt the impossible: introduce every API, show how they fit
into your life as a developer, and why they exist.
Erik Dörnenburg, TDD Expert, ThoughtWorks Inc. Builds: from Good to Great Fully scripted builds and continuous integration have become more mainstream in the past years. In this talk I want to share some of the great ideas and best practices for builds I’ve seen on projects that take continuous integration a step further. I will examine build pipelines, fully automated acceptance test suites, information radiators, virtualised test environments, and software quality reports. In addition I will discuss a few do’s and dont’s that can make the difference between a good build and a great build.
Sunday 6 June 2010
Comparaison gestion de projet Agile VS traditionnel pour SAAS: (Partie 3/3)
By Vincent on Sunday 6 June 2010, 14:34
This post is in French. There is no translation available. We are comparing Agile project management and Waterfall as well as explaining why Agile is a better solution for a SAAS.
The billet est en Français uniquement, Nous allons comparer la gestion de projet Agile avec les méthodes plus traditionnelles. Nous mettrons en avant pourquoi Agile est plus adapter a un logiciel de type SAAs.
Partie 1: Défauts des méthodes traditionnelles
Partie 2: Agile a travers Scrum
Partie 3 : Agile et outsourcing, bilan sur les processus de gestion de
projet
Sunday 30 May 2010
Comparaison gestion de projet Agile VS traditionnel pour SAAS: (Partie 2/3)
By Vincent on Sunday 30 May 2010, 13:22
This post is in French. There is no translation available.
Partie 1: Défauts des méthodes traditionnelles
Partie 2: Agile a travers Scrum
Sunday 23 May 2010
Comparaison gestion de projet Agile VS traditionnel pour SAAS: (Partie 1/3)
By Vincent on Sunday 23 May 2010, 12:54
This post is in French. There is no translation available. I'm trying to compare Agile project management and Waterfall as well as explaining why Agile is a better solution for a SAAS.
The billet est en Français uniquement, Je tente de comparer la gestion de projet Agile avec les méthodes plus traditionnelles. Nous mettrons en avant pourquoi Agile est plus adapter a un logiciel de type SAAs.
Partie 1: Défauts des méthodes traditionnelles
