A number of great sins have been committed under the guise of making software more maintainable. And 60% of software cost is during maintainance, according to Robert Glass. So what goal could be more laudable to pursue? The only problem is that we call things maintainable which are not. Putting remo...

Tal Ben-Shahar writes the following in “Happier”, his introductory book into the field of positive psychology: “The proper role of goals is to liberate us, so we can focus on the here and now.” In order to help us have a fulfilling life, our activities should both be meaningful and pleasurable. In t...

The code I write in Ruby is higher quality than the code I write in Java. Why? Because the language supports better abstractions. It lets me express a problem once, and reuse it many places. The strength of an environment comes from the quality of the libraries, and the qualities of the libraries co...

It’s been a year since my project replaced IBM WebSphere Application Server with a Java SE solution embedding Jetty. Looking back on the last year, I only have one regret: That it took us so long to make the switch. The difference takes a bit of perception: Our software no longer eats away our time,...

If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hostin...

This is the fourth article in my introduction to Rails. In the previous articles, we created a web application that let us edit articles, added support for comments to our articles, and added some nice AJAX effects. But a real blog needs feeds, a decent front page and some article formatting. In thi...

Whenever I talk about Agile Software Development with people who have a strategic point of view, a very pertinent question always comes up: What about fixed price projects? Establishing an initial relationship with a customer about creating a product is often perceived as a weakness of Agile methods...

In my previous articles, I showed you how to get started using Rails, and how to create model objects that are associated with each other. In this article, we will clean up the way that information is displayed and add support for dynamic HTML, or as the cool kids are calling it these days, AJAX. A ...

Mary Poppendieck has just published a presentation on Agile software development entering the mainstream (and how to fail with agile). The presentation contains a number of insightful key points, but one footnote struck a chord with me: According to Allen Ward’s “Lean Product and Process Development...

In my last article, I showed you how to get started with your Rails application. The result of the simple commands, rails blogdemo; cd blogdemo; ruby script/generate scaffold article title:string author:string content:text; rake db:migrate; ruby script/server was that you had your own simple blog up...

I am planning to write a series of articles on how to get started with Ruby on Rails. One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly. Here is what you need to do to get your first application up and running. Before you start, you need to install Ruby on ...

What is a good measurement of the quality of your architecture? The length of your documentation. The shorter, the better. There are three purposes of documentation that can be important to a project for its long time survival. First: How does a new developer get started working on the project. Seco...

I got this one from xkcd via Chris Searle. It’s now posted on the walls at work:

I went to Simula Research Lab’s seminar on estimation today. My conclusion is that despite many years of practice and research, we don’t know how to make estimates for even moderate projects correct within an order of magnitude. I think a new approach is needed! I wish I could’ve said that I learned...

The Norwegian word “smidig” means “agile”. So when we wanted to make a Norwegian conference for the Oslo Agile community, “smidig 2007” (November 26th and 27th) was a natural choice for a title. The seed of the conference was idea by Nils Christian Haugen and Aslak Hellesøy to have a whole day devot...

My presentation at JavaZone was riddled with technical difficulties this year. To make a long story short: I learned five minutes before the presentation the the projector would be inoperative for a while (turned out to be 30 minutes). This threw a wrench into my plans, as I had planned to open with...

My talk at JavaZone went surprisingly well. The fact that the projector went dead and that I was planning on opening with a demo raised my pulse, but I felt I managed to get my message across and that people were happy. The talk was about how we use Jetty to manage the full deployment life cycle of ...

“I just feel that in this company, there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.” “Sure. Now, if they’d only been Indian chiefs.” I have been real quiet lately. I will try to be better about writing in the future. I’ll do my best to stay away from project management issues, though. I’ve stepped on...

Sometimes, a quick and easy programming language like Ruby might not be so quick and easy. Sometimes, C may be easier. Sometimes, you might complete a task faster with C than with your favorite scripting language. I’ve long been a proponent of scripting languages. In particular, I’ve enjoyed learnin...

Anders Nordås shows how to throw a checked exception without declaring a throws clause. The method uses some inherently evil mechanisms (the name of the class “sun.misc.Unsafe” should be a tip of), and like Anders says, this should probably never be used in production. Basically, calling sun.misc.Un...

Why can Scrum deliver surprising results already in the first month of adoption? Because it helps the team focus on what’s really important. We had Jeff Sutherland visit Oslo XP meetup a few weeks back. Jeff is co-creator of the Scrum method (with Ken Schwaber) and CTO of PatientKeeper, a US health ...

Java.net’s latest poll asks: should checked exceptions be removed from the Java language. Sadly, the poll is not going the way it should right now. Many people feel checked exceptions are key to reliable programming. They are wrong. Please: Read this post, and help improve the Java programming langu...

A few months back, I saw a presentation that has kept me thinking ever since. Nicholas Negroponte is currently in the completing phases of a project I think might revolutionize the world. The $100 laptop project, or, as it is known now: One Laptop Per Child (OLTP). The idea behind the One Laptop Per...

I have been going to the Recent Object-Oriented Trends (ROOTS) conference in Bergen for the last seven years, the last two years as a member of the program committee. It always strikes me how this conference gives me a different view on what I thought I knew, instead of just teaching a few new progr...

Many people enjoy splitting testing up in a myriad of test types: Acceptance Tests, Functional Tests, Integration Tests, Performance Test, Technical Tests, Unit Tests. I have myself been guilty of such terminology as “embedded integration tests” and “requirement tests”. However, what unites the test...

The idea of effective reuse is a pervasive one. Software organizations have searched for ways to avoid “reinventing the wheel” for as long as there has been a software industry. But all research on research on reuse indicates that it is much more expensive than people expect. There are a few delicat...

Inspired by the “Hi, I’m a Mac” ads of Apple, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer has made these cute Ruby-on-Rails ads (featuring Ruby-on-Rails versus Java and Ruby-on-Rails versus PHP): Click here to view on YouTube

After spending more time than I care to indulge trying to get commercial application servers to behave, I finally decided to Do the Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work, and create a new application server from scratch. Well, not really a full application server. For 90 % of the Java applications...

Last night, I worked until after midnight trying to get our application up and running after some seemingly inconsequential changes in Spring-XML configuration. Our application consists of a total of 32 modules (including 6 wars and one “server” module that packages them, and 11 modules that are sha...

I often criticize products from the big vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle for what I call the “New Coke Effect”. As retold by Malcom Gladwell in Blink, Pepsi introduced blind taste tests in the 80s. They beat Coca Cola by a big margin. In order to regain the advantage, Coke developed “New Coke”...