monit

Saw lots of posts about horrible little shell scripts or full blown enterprise solutions but: http://mmonit.com/monit/ seems to work nicely for one or two boxes.

The good from latest agile project

• Sprint retrospectives are great in time boxing ongoing discussions and a good time to stop and think (as the name suggests).
• Good to limit fiddling with the process to once per sprint.

Some warnings:

• Users/customer will sit happily in sprint review meetings nodding BUT come the release they will really start thinking. The review meeting is no replacement for user testing. Really need to make the users use the app.

GWT RequestFactory network retry project

I've just been allowed to make a module from my day job FOSS.

https://github.com/salk31/gwt-rf-queue

With any luck it will get picked up by the community.

Big bang replacement of existing business system

1. Don't.
2. Almost certainly underestimated the complexity of the system you want to replace.
3. The users have learnt to live with the existing system.
4. The existing system includes endless Excel and Access things the users have knocked up and love.
5. The existing system will improve while you work on the shiny new replacement.
6. Building a new system from the ground up is exhausting.
7. Near impossible to manage user and management expectations of the new shiny system.

SCRUM/Agile

Great article here:
http://agile.dzone.com/articles/7-agile-best-practices-you

I've not enjoyed doing SCRUM on a greenfield project with a large set of fixed minimum requirements... Seems very unsuitable.

One great thing from SCRUM has been the sprint reviews where we decide things to try. Geeks are particularly bad at worrying to much.

RedRobot 0.2.13 released

http://code.google.com/p/redrobot/ 0.2.13 just released. Upgraded to use WebDriver 2.30.0 and an experimental listener API.