Virtual Surreality

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Browsing Posts in Agile / Lean

Object/Relational Mappings (ORM’s) are in the wrong place in the architecture.

An application should have minimal impedance mismatch with the persistence of its own data. External or ancillary systems should bear the cost of mapping between paradigms. If you want to access application data in a relational way for reports, do the mapping for the report.

Squealer is a simple, declarative language where the mapping from the tree structure of MongoDB to the tuple space in mySQL can be scripted.

I’m visiting our India operation for a few months, mostly at our Pune office. I’m trying my hand at various coaching activities on a number of fronts, including working with some of our technical leads, aspiring architects, business development team, and recruitment. I’ve always been a fan of our teams in India and China. In [...]

My colleague Jay Fields recently blogged about the value of test names. We had a little discussion about it yesterday on IM. Here’s a summary. Josh Graham I feel the test name is important for two reasons: 1) it is intentional programming – a neural pathway is established in your brain as you write the [...]

Hot on the heals of the Mingle 2.0 announcement, ThoughtWorks Studios has released information on the next generation of the world’s most popular Continuous Integration engine, CruiseControl, called Cruise. It is a ground-up rewrite accomplished in around 8 months with an emphasis on catering to enterprise software development teams and large-scale applications. It combines sequential [...]

My CTO, Rebecca Parsons, announced the publication of the ThoughtWorks Anthology a few days ago: I am thrilled to announce that the ThoughtWorks Anthology is now ON SALE! http://www.pragprog.com/titles/twa There are essays by Roy and Michael Robinson, Martin, Neal Ford, Tiffany Lentz, Stelios Pantazopoulos, Ian Robinson, Erik Doernenburg, Kristan Vingrys and James Bull, as well [...]

After a meeting of the office of the CTO, most of us stayed around in our San Francisco office for a few days to do some podcasts and to participate in a Code Jam for Inveneo, a not-for-profit who provide computers and connectivity to developing countries (especially their schools, hospitals, and poorer villages). They install [...]

UPDATE: 4 continents now represented. I’m not sure that we’ll ever get Antarctica, but come on South America and Africa, I know you’re out there. Calling all Agile and Lean user groups around the world. If you have an online presence, particularly with one of the usual online group sites, I encourage you to add [...]

Probably worth looking at if you’re international, as it contains many global references and is likely to be applicable to you anyway. http://www.straterjee.com/2008Issues&Opportunities.pdf Straterjee is a business and marketing strategy consultancy using an agile approach to deliver results more quickly (sound familiar?). Their people have foundations in business strategy and they’re part of Australia’s leading [...]

Most of my ThoughtWorks colleagues love tests. We love writing tests and watching them fail, and we love writing the code that then makes them pass. We love tests so much that most of the time taken in building the software is in the running of the tests to make sure we haven’t done something [...]

TestCase.getName() was useful from time to time. I recently used it on a project where the name of the test was used as the “client application” name in the database connection properties. This was good for tracking what tests were doing in the database when they made use of stored procedures (by using SQLSleuth for [...]