Paul Grenyer

by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory (978-0-321-53446-0) This book is pretty much what it says on the tin and that's a good thing. Behind all the usual Shiny Happy People Having Fun stuff you usually get in books from the Agile community is some sound, well expressed advice. This isn't just a book for Agile testers. There's a lot of good practical information that all testers should learn. It's a difficult balance to achieve, but I think the use of the word Agile may put of a lot of people who should really be reading this book. As well as the general practical testing advice the book also covers a lot of fundamental Agile stuff. It sets out some Agile testing principals and discusses the problems a lot of teams have when transitioning to Agile. It's all been written before, but never from a testers perspective, but to be honest it's not that different from the developer perspective. The book is very hung up on the idea that developers in Agile teams, and indeed t...

recently had a requirement to write a service, in Java, that monitors a directory and when new files with the correctly formatted name appear, send them to another system. All fairly simple stuff. There are many different ways of writing Java services, but we use Tomcat quite heavily, so rather than investigate another way, I decided to write a Tomcat servlet to act as the service. I started off by extending GenericServlet and overriding the init and destroy methods to write log messages to standard out. Then I wrote the appropriate web.xml to tell Tomcat about the servlet and wrapped it all up in a war file (basically a zip file with a Tomcat specific directory layout) and deployed it to my local Tomcat installation. I then checked the logs and found the log messages I'd put in the code. Not bad going for twenty minutes work and my first Tomcat servlet written from scratch. We've been gradually learning about Spring recently and I remembered reading that Spring had timers...

Wednesday Keynote: The Birth of Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin Brilliant! Simply brilliant! Uncle Bob is an enthusiastic and wonderfully engaging speaker. Through this keynote he chronicled the, now well understood, pitfalls of big upfront design, the emergence of XP and the birth and journey to maturity of Agile. Bob explained how Agile was adopted by business as it is more people focused than XP and how that caused the technical practices that made XP so good to be left behind. He highlighted how we need to reengage with the technical practices moving forward. We should all be using Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Pair Programming and Uncle Bob demonstrated why. In 2009 the benefits of using these are measurably several magnitudes greater than not using them. Uncle Bob has also brought out a new back to basics book to help us all remember how to write good code. Security in Distributed Systems and SOA by Nicolai Josuttis At previous conferences it has alw...