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.

Developer stereotypes

Young hacker - quickly and accurately writes huge swathes of code that works but nobody else can understand or fiddle with. Unit tests etc are an annoyance that just slow them down.

Puzzler - sees writing code as a series of puzzles to solve. How you solve them and what happens after that is not important. Once you have finished the "crossword" just move on.

Old hacker - slow and inaccurate but knows a lot of paths to ignore and needs unit tests to support the weight of their own code. Tendency to be grumpy as they have discussed X too many times already.

By the book - if it is not in a book then it is _wrong_! Don't bother trying to debate anything with them as only the book can explain it properly. Have you read the book!?

Tidy - doesn't really care what the code does or how it behaves but has a compulsion to re-write everything in a tidy way. Big danger is that they will happily spend months re-writing something just so it follows how they think it should be done.

Fiddle till it works - has no real clue what is going on but if they mess with something long enough it will eventually do roughly what is needed. Not worth trying to get them to tidy it up. It took them days to get it working and they are not prepared to mess with it again.

Demo of our SQL Query Builder widget

http://redquerybuilder.appspot.com/

Pure JavaScript and easy to connect to jQuery, GWT etc

Just feed it meta data and off it goes.

Brutally simple deployment has advantages

"one of the main reasons why operations stop and restart processes in applying a managed change – to be sure the process can indeed be restarted"

http://williamlouth.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/jazoon-%E2%80%9809-the-conference/