How to View WebSphere Trace Logs in the RAD Console

If you develop on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) using Rational Application Developer (RAD), you likely use the handy server integration features which allow you to “publish” modules directly to the appserver without having to leave the IDE.  One feature of this integration is that the eclipse console view displays the WebSphere SystemOut.log file so the developer can view log statements, again without leaving the IDE.

One problem with this integration as I see is that this log file only displays logging at the INFO level and above.  Meaning, most often a developer server usage is a single user (themselves) analyzing application logging that probably should be trace level – that is, logging that should never see the light of day in a multi-user production environment but is immensely helpful in tracing the flow of data through the classes and methods of an application.

WebSphere Application Server does provide the capability of changing the logging level by logger name or package at runtime, but reducing the level for a given set of loggers to FINE, FINEST, or ALL results in trace logging going to a separate log file. By default, this file is trace.log.

This default presents the problem for RAD users: the eclipse console doesn’t display the trace.log file.  Meaning, a developer can add trace statements the right way in their code – log.debug() in Apache Commons-Log or log.fine/finest() with java.util.logging – yet not see these log statements in the IDE.  I have found this often causes developers who prefer the IDE’s console to begin the bad practice of intensive logging with the INFO level so they can “see” the log statements in development.  This leads to unhappy server admins, let me tell you!

Here is how you can redirect WAS trace logs to SystemOut.log in a development WebSphere Application Server instance and view trace logging in the RAD/eclipse console.  It’s surprisingly simple and I only stumbled across this behavior by accident one day.  My whole team uses it, and it works (we use WAS v7) for us.

First, log into your WAS admin console. Locate the Logs and Trace section.

Next, if applicable, select the server/profile you have integrated with RAD.  In my screenshot, the WAS profile is for a WebSphere Portal (v6.1.5) instance, but it shouldn’t matter.

First, we need to find where WAS is writing its SystemOut.log file which RAD displays in a console view. Take note (copy into the clipboard) of the file path, including any variables:

Next, go back to the server logs pane and choose Diagnostic Trace.

In the Diagnostic Trace settings, note the current file path. You may want to save a note with the original location or choose to backup your entire WAS profile config files as a safety precaution.

Change the value of the trace log to the value of the path to SystemOut log.

Click the Save button at the bottom of the page, then save these config changes to the master repository:

You should now be able to see application trace logs in your RAD console for your integrated WebSphere Application Server profile:

Feel free to add your own notes, comments, feedback in the comments section below. I’m curious as to how other teams utilize their RAD/WebSphere integration.

Happy Coding,

Scott

iOS update error 1013

Tonight I decided to update an iPhone 4 to iOS 4.3.1. I sync my phone regularly and have never encountered an update problem. That changed tonight as the 4.3.1 update failed about five times in a row with error code 1013.

Clicking “more info” on the error message led me to this page which mentioned a possible problem connecting to gs.apple.com. I fired up a browser and tried http://gs.apple.com and was greeted with an Apache server directory listing. I figured since I got a response (and not a connection error) the problem must have been elsewhere, so I tried other suggestions from the support article: updating OSX, updating iTunes, changing USB ports, and rebooting. After each one, no luck: still the 1013. I began to sweat.

I read the support article closer, and even visited a large thread on the support forums and decided to peek at the /etc/hosts file. Sure enough, there was an entry for gs.apple.com! Where’d that come from?

I used a real man’s editor and commented out the entry for gs.apple.com. The very next restore attempt succeeded on first try.

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts
Password:

Enter your own password at the prompt and press return.

Your hosts file may be slightly different, but you’ll want to comment out the entry for gs.apple.com.

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1       localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost
fe80::1%lo0     localhost
#74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
"/etc/hosts" 11L, 264C

The important part is adding the # at the beginning of the line with gs.apple.com.

Note: if you’ve gotten this far but need help with the editor in this example itself, leave a comment and I can walk you through it. It’s the “vi” editor and it’s not very straightforward if you’re not used to the command prompt scene… there are several good quickstarts available online as well.

Update 4/5/2011: a good tutorial on editing the hosts file in general can be found here.

Hope this helps someone,

-Scott

Update 4/5/2011: Here are the detailed steps on how to edit the system hosts file.  These are instructions for OSX Snow Leopard. (I think with Windows you can just edit the file in Notepad; the file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)

Update 4/27/2011: Here are a couple of articles from Macworld Magazine which explain why this may have happened.

OSX Snow Leopard instructions

1. Open the Terminal app.
   Click on the spotlight icon (magnifying glass in the top right corner of your screen) and type “terminal”.  You should see a black square looking icon; click it.
2. Edit the Hosts file.
   I believe you need to be using an account with administrative privileges.
3. Once Terminal.app opens, click on it and you should be able to type at the blinking cursor.
4. Type the following:
   sudo vi /etc/hosts
5. Press the enter (or return) key.
6. The terminal will ask you for your password. Type it carefully, because for security reasons it won’t show on the screen.
7. Note: if you mistype your password, you should see “Sorry, try again.” up to three times.
8. If you correctly entered your password, the editor will show you the contents of the hosts file.
9. You should see a few lines like the example above.
10. Use the down arrow key to move the cursor to the line that has “gs.apple.com” in it.
    Leave the cursor on the first character in the line.
11. Important: press the I key once.
    This puts the editor in “insert” characters mode so you can type inside the file. We’re not in Pages or Microsoft Word, and this editor is not very forgiving -  so type carefully.
12. At the beginning of the line that has “gs.apple.com”, type a single hash (also known as pound) character.
    It’s above the 3, so press the shift and 3 keys at the same time.  If a 3 shows up instead of #, press the delete key to correct.
13. The line should change colors.
    The # character tells the system to ignore this line in the file, which is what we want.
14. Press the colon ( : ) key once.  That’s the shift and semicolon ( ; ) keys at the same time.
15. Press the x key once.
16. Press enter.
    The :x command tells the editor to save and exit.
17. Close and restart iTunes
18. Re-attempt the iOS update or restore.

Eclipse Mylyn with Lighthouseapp.com

I’ve been using Lighthouse for tracking tasks and issues in my iOS development. I like it because it’s cloud-based and fairly elastic; right now as I write I’m the only developer but I hope to expand in the future. I have no interest in administering an issue tracking system (I’ve done so with Bugzilla and Scarab in the past) because I want to focus my available side-job time on development as much as possible.

I decided to give integrated task management a whirl using eclipse as both my mac subversion client and Java IDE. If you’re wondering how this ties into my iOS development – I have some supporting server-side Java apps and I’ve been less than impressed with Xcode’s built-in SVN tooling.

A while back I saw some early interest in integrating Mylyn and Lighthouse, and decided to see where it went. Below are the steps I took to integrate to the point where I can:

• flag what issue I’m working on in eclipse, and then have eclipse automatically add task info into my source control commit comments
• Quickly create tasks from within the IDE when I discover TODOs, without having to flip back and forth to retain context. Note: right now this is limited to doing so with the embedded browser; I’ll update this post if I find out how to create from eclipse itself.
• Code in Xcode and Eclipse and commit from Eclipse, performing one commit for changes in multiple projects for a single fix or enhancement

First of all, let me say I didn’t do 90% of the legwork here. I followed the steps in forum posts on Lighthouse support and a blog entry I found. I tweaked a bit after that.

Step one: Install Mylyn Web Templates support

As of this writing, the Mylyn connector needed for Lighthouse integration didn’t come with Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) SR2 and was marked as an “incubation” component.

You may (probably?) need to add the Mylyn incubation update site to your software repositories:

Next, install the connector:

From the Help menu, Install New Software

The Mylyn Incubator Components install dialog

Choose “Mylyn Connector: Web Templates”.  This component will be configured after we install it to connect to Lighthouseapp’s XML feed of your tickets.

Restart eclipse when prompted.

Step Two: Configure the Connector

You’ll want to gather your lighthouse project URL before configuring a new Mylyn repository in your eclipse Task Repositories view.  You can find the URL for your project(s) on the right  side of Lighthouse after logging in:

Usually the URL is in this form:

http://[your-lighthouse-account].lighthouse.com/projects/[your-project]

You’ll then want to configure a new task repository in Mylyn using the web connector.  Open the Tasks view (Window -> Show View ->Task Repositories) and click the “Add Task Repository…” icon.

New Mylyn Task Repository Dialog

Enter your Lighthouse project URL as the “Server” URL.  Give this project a meaningful label in the dialog (this string will display in Eclipse any time you interact with this repository) and leave the “anonymous” checkbox selected.  We’ll get to authentication in a minute.

Add a parameter named “query” and a value of “all” in the “Additional Settings” section.  This tells the Lighthouse XML query API to search all tickets, both open and resolved.

Under “Http Authentication” be sure to check the box and enter your Lighthouse user ID and password.  I chose to have eclipse remember this password.

In the “Advanced Settings” section you can enter the following:

• Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/
• New Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/new
• Query Pattern:

.*?({Id}.+?).*?({Status}.+?).*?({Description}.+?).*?({Owner}.+?)

If this works, you should be able to view Lighthouse issues in the embedded browser like this:

Light house Tickets view in Eclipse Mylyn

You should now be able to open the Task List view and see a list of Lighthouse issues.

Step Three: Configuring SCM Commits

I wanted to be able to auto-tag my version control with mention of the or issue I was addressing.  With mylyn, you basically “activate” a given task / defect, perform coding, and eclipse then knows what task with which to tag your SCM commit.  To modify this from default, choose Window -> Preferences on a PC or Eclipse -> Preferences on a Mac, choose “Tasks” and enter this for the commit comment:

${task.status} - ${connector.task.prefix} ${task.key}: ${task.description} ${task.url} [#${task.key}]

Once this is set up, your check-ins should looks something along these lines:

Mylyn svn commit dialog

Conclusion

In this tutorial we installed the mylyn tooling and the incubation Mylyn Web Templates plugin.  We then configured it with our Lighthouse project URL and a regular expression that allows eclipse to pluck data elements from each ticket to render in its gui (particularly when you are inspecting a single web value.  We updated the commit template preference so our check-ins can reflect the task we were working.

Hope this helps,

-Scott

A Halloween scare: Facebook on Public Wi-Fi

Update: As of January 2011 Facebook now offers browsing in ssl mode without requiring the use of a userscript. Just visit your account settings, expand Account Security, and check the box that reads “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible.”

---

Normally, I avoid unencrypted wi-fi hotspots like the plague.  If I do end up using one in a pinch, I avoid services that require (or allow) me to authenticate then continue surfing in “personalized” mode.  That is, surfing the site without HTTPS.  For example, when you sign on to your bank’s website, you always see “https” in the address bar of your browser – it never goes away until you either log out or go to another website.  With a browser and a little knowlege (“look for the lock”) it’s fairly easy to see when you’re accessing personalized content.  When using apps on a smartphone, it’s almost impossible to see when HTTPS is actually used without special phone configuration.

As I type this, I’ve been forced to use “guest” wi-fi at a hospital system away from home for about a week now as my daughter recovers from surgery.  I’ve needed to stay in touch with friends and family via Facebook, but the idea of having my FB account compromised – or my FB interactions readable by some bored kid I don’t know – concerns me greatly.  I noticed that I can pretty much change any URL on facebook to use HTTPS, but for some silly reason the site renders all URLs on pages to use http, even if you navigated using https.  Very annoying.  If my bank did this I’d use another bank.  With the world running out of IP (v4) addresses it seems most everyone will be sharing an address.  A large number of those users will be using Wi-Fi, and a large number of those users won’t be savvy (bored?) enough to read this blog or even be aware of the danger… which makes it seem (to me) to be a very bad idea to use cookie + IP address security for what should be secure site personalization.  Sure, SSL adds server-side overhead but buy yourself a few accelerators for goodness sake, Facebook!

I did however find a pair of greasemonkey scripts that for the most part seem to make facebook behave as I want it to: completely over https. The first is Facebook in HTTPS and works for most of the hyperlinks rendered in FB.  However, at time of this writing, it doesn’t force asynchronous (ajax) requests to go through https… which, if you think about how many times you see the wait animation gizmos, is what a lot of FB functionality uses. To compensate for this, I also installed a script called Force Facebook HTTPS Secure, which manipulates Facebook Javascript to use HTTPS for ajax calls.  So far when using these two scripts in tandem I’ve not seen any nonsecure FB connectivity detected using the recently released Firesheep proof of concept Firefox plugin.

On the web:

• Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox
• Facebook in HTTPS greasemonkey script
• Force Facebook HTTPS Secure greasemonkey script
• Firesheep add-on for Firefox

Hope this helps,

-Scott

gconsync wants to use my keychain…

Today’s tidbit is about a nagging OSX dialog that doesn’t offer “remember this decision” or “don’t ask me again.”

I got a new iPhone, and decided to use Google’s ActiveSync (MS Exchange) integration to sync my contacts in the cloud for free and not $99/year. The cloud’s not all that useful if it’s only covering one device, so I set up Google contact sync on my account on our family mac.

Apparently this causes a background process called gconsync to be run at an interval. Understandably, this tool has to log into your Google account in order to synchronize contact updates with Address Book. For me, whenever it would try to run it would enqueue a prompt asking if it’s OK to access a local keychain which holds Google login info. I say enqueue because since I don’t use that computer often, I’d sit down to have to click through a half dozen of the same prompt… click cancel, cancel, cancel… you get the picture. The actual text of the dialog is “gconsync wants to use the ‘sheaberlin’ keychain. Please enter the keychain password.”

To make the matter worse, the prompt seems to make Finder hang (even the menu) until you appease its desire for Google info. This wasn’t going to cut it for me.

I found an Apple Support thread discussing a different daemon process which steered me to the solution: to unlock the keychain it was asking for. Unlike my screenshot above, gconsync was looking for an application password entry in my personal keychain (“sheaberlin” instead of “login”) named GoogleContactSyncService. There was nothing else in that keychain so I set it to never lock after system sleep or idle. Boom, no more gconsync nags.

Steps to squelch this dialog (from the aforementioned knowledge base thread):
1) Launch Keychain Access. On Snow Leopard it’s found in Applications —> Utilities —> Keychain Access
2) Highlight “login” (or whichever keychain is mentioned in your gconsync prompt – for me it was the one for my username, “sheaberlin”) under “Keychains” in the upper left
3) From the Edit menu select “Change settings for Keychain…”
4) Uncheck “Lock when sleeping” and click “Save”. Also uncheck “lock after … minutes of inactivity”.

Hope this helps someone,

-Scott

a milemarker on the road to incremental development

It has been months since I posted about my quest… vision… hope to pry my employer from the grip of the waterfall and steer us towards more agile/lean/iterative/incremental processes (starting with Scrum) to make us better, faster, cheaper. I don’t expect anyone to have been following this saga but if for no other reason than to help me remember where we came from once we get there, here’s a quick update.

I pitched Scrum a long while back (2008) to my team and direct management.  I received support and buy-in, which was reassuring. Naturally, my group of pigs “got it” and it was time to sell the idea to some chickens.

I eventually presented scrum to a set of individuals responsible for application architecture and project management in my systems area.  Also present was a customer advocate – someone I saw as a shoe-in for a Scrum product owner role – for the business customer of my team’s system.  Everyone present seemed to see great value in the principles and execution of Scrum.  However, they raised questions surrounding adoption of scrum at our organization which has spent a lot of time, money, and effort attempting to “perfect” what it has been doing for nearly 30 years.  Most of their questions dealt with transition to such a process, and explaining why their questions are valid would take me more writing than you’d care to read (and would tread upon disclosure) – explaining our systems architecture, methodology, culture, etc. Without answers to these questions, we were not given the approval to proceed with pitching the idea up the chain of command. I received good feedback but there was still (to me) an air of “that’s just not how we’ve always done it.”

I participated in several corporate efforts to streamline, increase efficiency, and boost productivity, each with varying (and I would say arguable) degrees of measurable success. I became convinced that changing “the process” was the best answer but that scrum would never be accepted. I still took every opportunity to share the Scrum book with whoever would read it.

Then some changes in our market and industry started threatening how we do business. Then the budget year changed and some belt tightening occurred. And then, my team was tasked with building something really big – something we can’t really afford to deliver late. Pressures mounted, demands for streamlined approaches and compressed timelines began to fly, a few “why nots” were issued, and high level stakeholders started stepping in.

I saw how Scrum could help us.

It’s a little early to declare success just yet. But with this current project, I’m directly interacting more with executive-level stakeholders. Their fears of being over budget or late to market on this “special project” are causing them to push the team to rethink how we attack the effort, with less emphasis on how we might have always done things. To come up with ways of tracking progress and measuring what have we gotten for what we’ve paid to date.

I piloted two 2-week increments under the radar. At the conclusion of each I gave a demo – real working software – to the chief stakeholders, each update growing the functionality delivered in previous increments. Big success. We’re now on our 3rd iteration and the radar is on high-power; there’s no flying under it now.

Heads are turning, and I’m literally dusting off my Scrum book to hand to people who want to understand where these “radical” ideas are coming from.

To revisit my fishing analogy, I’ve cast one last time, and this time I can feel a big one bumping the lure – so aggressively I am anticipating the big bite.

To success,

-Scott

HP Mercury Quality Center with IE8 (or not)

Today at work I installed Internet Explorer 8 for local development and testing. Soon I found myself sweating as I was no longer able to access our issue tracking system, Mercury (now HP) Quality Center 9.0. QC is basically a full-window ActiveX control client-server app that auto-installs when you visit the QC home page of your local QC server. Only, IE 8 kept crashing and auto-retrying the activex auto-install around 3 times, finally failing with a “too many failures” message. Luckily I stumbled across the QC Explorer download a few pages down in my google search results. Voila, standalone QC – full featured, at that – without using IE.  Just install it, launch it, and in the address bar enter your existing QC URL with it (including /qcbin/start_a.htm).

/whew.

Hope this helps someone else,

- Scott

Resetting zoom with UIScrollView

Update 6/2010: I wrote this post prior to the release of iPhone SDK 3.0. See my comment for a straight forward approach in 3.0+.

This is my first blog post about something along my iPhone development travels that had me stumped.  I’ve had quite a few, having come from a primarily Java background, so I hope to post more.

I’ve only been working with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch for about 4-5 months now, so it’s very likely there’s an easier way to do some of this.  Feel free to post comments but don’t knock a n00b too badly.

I have an app that displays photos, nearly full-screen.  I wanted to add zooming, so I looked it up in the SDK docs and adding touch-zoom was a cinch.

Adding zoom reset wasn’t so straightforward.  Nor was it even documented in the SDK docs.

It turned out (in my case) to be fairly simple, but took a lot of trial and error.  I don’t know why Apple can’t just add a

-(void)resetZoom:(BOOL)animated

method to UIImageView.  It makes me wonder if perhaps the approach I took won’t work for all scenarios so take this as my “your mileage may vary” disclaimer.

For my app(s), the only subview of of the UIScrollView is a single UIImageView (I have other view components omitted here for brevity):

+---UIView (superview)
¦   +---UIScrollView (myScrollView)
¦   ¦   +---UIImageView (myImageView)

Here is what I did in my view controller managing the view containing the scroll view:

Summary:
1) I store the original “center” point of the scrollview subview that is being zoomed by snagging it in viewDidLoad. *
2) I created a Transform via the CGAffineTransformMakeScale() function, specifying 1.0 as the scale dimensions and apply it to the imageview.
3) I set the content size of the scroll view to zero to stop it from scrolling. **
4) I set the center of the image view back to its original center.

Notes:
* my views are all prototyped in Interface Builder, and I didn’t want to have to hard code this number.  If an app was building the UI programmatically keeping track of this would be a bit different.
** This seemed odd to me at first; my gut tells me this works for me because most of my views are set to auto resize to fill; I have not experimented outside this setup.

Code:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    NSLog(@"VC view did load");
    [super viewDidLoad];
    // ... other work
    originalImagePos = myImageView.center;
}

//...

-(void)resetImageZoom {
    NSLog(@"Resetting any image zoom");
    CGAffineTransform transform = CGAffineTransformMakeScale(1.0, 1.0);
    myImageView.transform = transform;
    [myScrollView setContentSize:CGSizeZero];
    myImageView.center = originalImagePos;
}

I found the tip about using CAAffineTransform online, but that only “unzoomed” my image view; the scroll view was still scrollable – the image view could be scrolled completely out of the viewport!  I spent the rest of my time trying to figure out how to fix that and through trial and error found that repositioning the scrollview’s subview and setting the scrollview’s content size to zero worked for me.

Since I couldn’t find any blogs or forum posts about stuff other than the CAAffineTransform step at the time, I’ve posted this to hopefully help anyone else having this same problem.  I had one person follow up on my tweet for help who had the same issue and the samples above are largely from an e-mail response I sent to him.

Happy iPhoning,

-Scott H

flipping and pitching agile

I see a big one, just below the surface.  It’s just floating there, looking for something but is not sure exactly what.  All it knows is that it’s hungry.

I’m here to feed it.

Right now, you could say I’m flipping and pitching agile.  Since I’m in South Carolina, we’ll call it flippin’ and pitchin‘.  I’ve got a nice enticing lure – shiny, catchy, yet astonishingly simple and lightweight.  It’s called the scrum jig.

For most of 2008, I pitched agile approaches at work.  It was a big hit especially with the schools of coworkers – the pigfish immediately “got it.”  One team “sort of” tried scrum – the daily meeting part – but didn’t implement its backlog, planning, and sprint concepts which was fairly disappointing to me.   I just needed to get some bites from some bigger, more influential stakeholder fish to actually shape up a development shop with 40+ years of successful software development (and a hefty dose of “why change process now?” but a desire to be faster and more flexible).  I discussed scrum one on one with a development director and the area vice president; both seemed to like the ideas but had reservations.  The VP actually read my copy of Agile Software Development with Scrum, but eventually (so it seemed) spit out the lure without biting.

Late in the year, I got another nibble: a development manager heard about my plans to attend the Greenville JUG presentation on agile methodology in practice and wanted to hear the presentation.  Shortly thereafter, following several discussions on how scrum and agile processes were a formalization of many of the ideas we had experimented with on our team – collaborative development sans cubicles a-la war-room style, embedding testers and analysts with developers, test driven development, frequent communication / collaboration with customer representatives, etc.

Tomorrow I give a modified version of Mike Cohn’s reusable scrum presentation to several design architects and the managers whose personnel will make up the first real scrum team at my company (my day job, that is).  On Thursday, I’ll give the presentation again – this time to senior management and customer leadership – as a kickoff to formal implementation of scrum for delivering software in 2009.  For my team, our primary product is a rapidly expanding portal of web tools with our primary customers being the marketing wings of our various business units.  It is these people who are out there winning / losing contracts based on our web presence, functional offerings, and speed to market; the people who bring home the bacon (pun intended).

I have no doubt after a couple of sprints my customers will fall the proverbial hook, line, and sinker for scrum – paving the way for widespread adoption and even more agile approaches I think could really impact our effectiveness – techniques such as user stories.  I’m hoping that other teams notice the sustainable increase in productivity – or are told to take notice from above – and we have to invest in treble hooks as more fish try to bite this shiny scrum jig.   If I can blog about having our first scrum of scrums in 2010 I’ll be happy as a clam.

Happy fishing,

-Scott H

the road to agile

Let’s face it; we’re not all free from the Waterfall.  We’re not all working in technology-rife cities with so many available steady development jobs that we can turn our nose at organizations who still believe in the big design up front paradigm.  Several of the presenters at NoFluffJustStuff conferences, used to being at the reigns of their own consulting firms seem to suggest that if you can’t get your employer to go head-first Agile you should find another job; I just don’t think this is quite realistic for many (most?) of us.  (As a side note, I’m a three time alum of NFJS and I learn each and every time and have applied many of the techniques and practices taught there.)

I consider myself to be rather influential and trusted at my day job; most of my technical proposals and recommendations are accepted and implemented.  However, I find that since we work for one of (if not the) largest employers in the state, and “The Process” as I’ll call it is believed to be tried, true, and functional for over thirty years, any ideas or proposals that would seem to cast doubt on The Process lead to immediate puckering at the senior management level.

But enough about that; one can still hope.  This post isn’t really to discuss my day job.  Though, I do believe I’ll start blogging regularly about my quest to introduce Agile methodologies to who is likely the largest IT organization in South Carolina and is even more likely the largest, staunchest waterfall implementor.

What I really want to talk about is this past week’s presentation, “Agile in Practice” at the Greenville, SC Java User’s Group.  The presenter, Dave Cowden of CoLinx, LLC, was a former employer of mine and is someone I consider a mentor.   I have to say that as an “agile hopeful” his presentation gave me great hope for success in selling a more iterative approach within my own organization.  He shared insights and anecdotes on his company’s transition from the shackles of BDUF.

I’ll not regurgitate his presentation, which is available online.  Some key points that jumped out at me (combined with other materials I’m familiar with) were:

• Recognize Agile vs. agile (preach, hook, and $$ sell you something vs. flexibility and “do whatever works”).
• Don’t let “being Agile” become restrictive and rigid itself (remember the Golden Hammer)
• Build a culture of trust (intra-team, developers to management, product team to customer, etc)
• Automate, automate, automate
• It is possible to “be agile” and still follow “waterfall-ish” schedules (e.g. if the customer is happy with or demands quarterly releases, give them monthly prototype previews leading up to the production release).
• Who really uses design documentation anyways?  Doesn’t it just suck the life out of post-project documentation? (feels like a repeat, only, the project didn’t end up completely matching design anyways).
• Only build what you need right now.

All in all it was more than worth the two hour drive from Columbia for this presentation.  Like I said earlier, it gave me more angles and “ammo” to pitch agile where I work.  I applaud Dave for his willingness to share his group’s experiences during the transition.

-Scott