Jeff Sutherland: Powerful Strategy for Defect Prevention: Improve the Quality of Your Product - "A classic paper from IBM shows how they systematically reduced defects by analyzing root cause. The cost of implementing this practice is less than the cost of fixing defects that you will have if you do not implement it so it should always be implemented." - categorize defects by type, severity, component, when introduced; 80% of them will originate in 20% of the code; apply prioritized automated testing (solve always the largest problem first). "In three months, one of our venture companies cut a 4-6 week deployment cycle to 2 weeks with only 120 tests."
Ebook draft: Beheading the Software Beast - Relentless restructurings with The Mikado Method (foreword by T. Poppendieck) - the book introduces the Mikado Method for organized, always-staying-green (large-scale) refactorings, especially useful for legacy systems, shows it on a real-world example (30 pages!), discusses various application restructuring techniques, provides practical guidelines for dealing with different sizes of refactorings and teams, discusses in depth technical debt and more. To sum it up in three words: Check it out!
Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer (well, it's actually about 4h of focused programming + some hours of the rest) - a very interesting reading with some inspiring ideas. We should all find some time to follow up the field, to reflect on our day and learn from it (kaizen)
The Agile Testing Quadrants - understanding the different types of tests, their purpose and relation by slicing them by the axis "business facing x technology facing" and the axis "supporting the team x critiquing the product" => unit tests x functional tests x exploratory testing x performance testing (and other). It helps to understand what should be automated, what needs to be manual and helps not to forget all the dimensions of testing.
Adam Bien: Can stateful Java EE apps scale? - What does "stateless" really mean? "Stateless only means, that the entire state is stored in the database and has to synchronized on every request." "I start the development of non-trivial (>CRUD) applications with Gateway / PDOs [JH: stateful EJBs exposing JPA entities] and measure the performance and memory consumption continuously." Some general tips: Don't split your web server and servlet container, don't use session replication.
Brian Tarbox: Just-In-Time Logging - How to remove 90% of worthless logs while still getting detailed logs for cases that matters - the solution is to (1) only add logs for a particular "transaction" with the system into a runtime structure and (2) flush it to the log only if the transaction fails or st. else significant happens with it. The blog also proposes a possible implementation in detail.
Test Driven Infrastructure with Vagrant, Puppet and Guard - this is interesting for me for I'm using Vagrant and Puppet on my project to create and share development environments or their parts and applying test-first approach to it seems interesting as do also the tools, rspec-puppet, cucumber-puppet and Guard (events triggered by file changes) and referenced articels.
5+1 Sonar Plugins you must not miss (2012 version) - Timeline Plugin (with Google Visualization Annotated TimeLine), Useless Code Plugin, SIG Maintainability Model Plugin (metrics Analysability, Changeability, Stability, Testability), Quality Index Plugin (1-number health indicator), Technical Debt Plugin
Links to Keep
Niklas Schlimm: Java EE 6 vs. Spring Framework: A technology decision making process - key factors to consider when deciding between Java EE and Spring (or a mixed application of both) - value of standards, independence/flexibility, production-readiness, downwards compatibility ...
Clojure Corner
ClojureScript One Guide - "ClojureScript One shows you how to use ClojureScript to build single-page, single-language applications in a productive, effective and fun way."
Clojure 2011 Year in Review - a list with important events in the Clojure sphere with links to details - C. 1.3.0, ClojureScript, logic programming with core.logic, clojure-contrib restructuring, birth of 4Clojure and Avout.
Clojure Atlas - interesting project (alpha version) presenting Clojure documentation in the form of interactive graph of related concepts and functions; it's far from perfection but I like the concept and consider paying those ~ $25 for the 1.3.0 version when its out (however, the demo is free and it might become open-sourced in 2012)
