Ever heard “We’re doing Scrum, but…”?
According to Jeff Sutherland at Øredev 2008, great Scrum teams can boost revenue by 400%. With ScrumButt you are limited to 0-35%. When are we going to understand that Scrum is just a set of simple rules and common sense and not a buffet to choose elements from….?
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 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 
This year I came back and did what I did not do last year. Just as they did then, Epsilon IT arranged a coding challenge at their booth. Last year I ended at 5th place, but this year I actually came home with a brand new iPod…. A good day for me at Øredev
The fourth annual Øredev Developers Conference is up this week. Bigger than ever stretching over five days, including workshops, courses and a three day conference. I am attending for the third time this year, having missed only the first one.
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.
The last couple of weeks, I have been testing a mock framework called PowerMock. See The PowerMock website for more information and download.
The short version is that this framework extends Easymock and lets you mock static methods, private methods, construction of new objects, bybass encapsulation and more to enable testing of code that used to be considered difficult (or impossible…?) to test.
