Maven 2: I Need to Try This

Feel this pain much?

Dependency management has a long tradition of being a complicated mess for anything but the most trivial of projects. "Jarmageddon" quickly ensues as the dependency tree becomes huge, complicated, and embarrassing to architects who are scorned by new graduates who "totally could have done it better." "Jar Hell" follows, where versions of dependencies on one system are not quite the same versions as those used for development; they have either the wrong version or conflicting versions between similarly named JARs. Hence, things begin breaking and pinpointing why proves difficult. Maven solves both of these problems by having a common local repository from which to link to the correct projects, versions and all.

From an article by Eric Redmond. Yet another tool I need to try ... sigh.

A History Lesson

By wandering around the original wiki, you can read many conversations that have informed modern software development. Try reading Code Smell, or One Responsibility Rule, or even take a look at the birth of Extreme Programming. If you're at all interested in the ideas that formed and support these principles of object-oriented programming, it's a very interesting place to roam and read.

A Project to Manage Eclipse Workspaces

I found this from reading the Open Source at Eclipse Blog (generally an excellent read, by the way). There is an eclipse project for bundling projects together, possibly from various sources, into a single eclipse workspace. The project is called Buckminster and certainly looks worth a try. See the project's home page and the referenced blog post for more details. (Hmm, I just discovered that Camino won't spell-check my form ... hm. Perhaps it's time to once again consider Safari. :-/ )

Eclipse Plugins

Some must-have plugins for Eclipse, including their update sites:

Mylar

I'll let them describe themselves.

Mylar is a task focused UI for Eclipse that makes working with very large workspaces as easy as working with small ones. It supports task management and monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand. Mylar uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what's related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylar also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

Eclipse 3.2RC2: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.2 Eclipse 3.1.x: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.1

Subclipse

Subversion plugin. Eclipse 3.x: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.0.x

There It Is...

There's the idea, the meme (via Dave Hoover's Blog). If only I could have articulated it so effectively. Oh well, I suppose I need more practice. I used to write so much better before the Army. I did it once, I'm somewhat confident I can do it again ... unless I'm too old. Anyway, my mind wanders again (is that age?). Mr. Hoover references the following quote: (I believe from Justin Gehtland)

The "safe language" argument appeals to fear, while the "flexible language" argument appeals to a sense of opportunity and adventure. Both are powerful motivations, so for a long time this argument has been a stalemate. Happily, that period is coming to an end. Two new factors have come into play: automated testing and transparency. Over the next five years they will turn the balance totally in the favor of more flexible languages.

I have a bit more to say about this, but I think I'll mull it over a bit more first. It's a loaded subject.

On the subject of dynamic languages: the new apartment is mostly unpacked, so I hope to find some more time to play with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Between RoR and Eclipse Monkey, I'm like a kid with way too many toys. I have to apologize to all the gracious folks from CitCon that I promised to contact, it's been a bit hectic.

Agile ROI

Via Maruis Marais: Thoughtworks (one of the gracious sponsors of CitCon) commissioned Forrester Research to study the return on investment of their Agile practices. They've published their results here. The results are very encouraging. For example:

Client: Four Fortune 500 Companies

Results:

• Improved time to benefit by 69%
• Reduced cost by 57%
• Reduced effort by 62%
• Reduced critical defects by nearly 80%
• Reduced overall defects by more than 60%

Participants in the study indicated they realized or expected to realize 29 to 66 percent risk-adjusted return on investment over three years using ThoughtWorks' agile development approach.

This is not surprising to those of us who've already had a taste of the Agile kool-aide, but hard numbers may help swing some skeptics.

These numbers show why we should do Agile. More value per unit investment. Moreover, the value is returned earlier in the development cycle.