I’m currently mentoring a team at my client’s site that’s using test driven development (TDD) to improve the design of their application. We’re also using Struts 1.x, and they want to use StrutsTestCase as a standard for testing.  Okay, so far so good.

Being a fan of the Spring Framework, it should be no surprise that I want to make dependency injection a big part of refactoring to make their application more modular.  So I set off, Google in hand, to try to figure out how to make Struts, StrutsTestCase and Spring all play nice together.  Turns out that it can be done, but it’s surprisingly difficult, and I couldn’t find anything telling me exactly how to do it. There were hints in a number of places, but it took me a couple of days to put all of those together.  I’m going to share, so hopefully you won’t have to go through what I did. Read more

Well, if we can’t have our flying cars, maybe we can use these mini jet wings to fly to and from work. I’m really interested in this sort of thing since my commute has gotten a bit longer lately.

Yves Rossy flew 22 miles from France to England in 13 minutes.   He leapt from a plane a mile and a half from the ground and fired up his jets.    He managed to get across to England without any problems and parachuted into a field beyond the famous white cliffs of Dover.

Man flies across English Channel with jet-propelled wing [via Geeks Are Sexy]

In my continuing efforts to provide my readers with all that is good and right with the gadget world, I present the Silverwolf Rubber Band Gun:

Based on Metal Gear Solid 4, The “Silver Wolf” semi-automatic rubberband gun is made out of shiny stainless steal and features a laser targetting system, allowing you to devastate your colleagues at that next office war.

The Amazing “Silver Wolf” Rubberband Gun [via Geeks Are Sexy]

We got into an interesting conversation at work the other day regarding the role of risk in an agile project. Perhaps I have an extremely broad definition of risk, but I believe that risk is a primary, and perhaps the most important, thing to consider when running such a project. Read more

I’ve blogged in the past about botnets, and it should be pretty clear that they can be powerful entities for good or evil. With human nature being what it is, they’re mostly used for evil. As a botnet controller, I imagine it must be very seductive to look at a popular service such as Facebook and drool at the prospect of all those computers we could recruit. But how to infect them?

Researchers in Greece apparently thought the same thing as well, and they’ve produced a research application called Picture of the Day.  This little app claims to display a different picture from National Geographic on your page, and it does that.  Unfortunately, it also serves up software to turn your computer into a botnet zombie.

It didn’t take much to get people to install it, apparently. According to the report on Dark Reading:

Interestingly, the researchers did not invite users via Facebook to download the application, but still managed to attract around 1,000 users who downloaded Facebot within the first few days it went live. They merely announced its availability to members of their research group and asked them to pass it to their colleagues. From there it apparently spread to other Facebook users.

As a security-type person, this sort of thing really concerns me.  I know that the average user isn’t really all that concerned about security until it bites them in the hinder. I can’t even get developers to be concerned about it most of the time! The spread of social networking sites creates a target-rich environment for the spread of just these sorts of compromises, and it’s not at all clear how to fix it.

Okay, okay, I’m a Mythbusters junkie, heck my wife even got me a signed picture when they visited Milwaukee (she got to go on stage with them!) but this is over the top anyway. The boys built an 1,100 barrel paintgun to paint the Mona Lisa in under a second, which they demonstrated at nVIDIA’s NVISION show this week.  Make sure to wait for the slo-mo replay at the end!

Via [Gizmodo]

So I’ve been absent for a while. Daniel and I are working on a book on agile adoption anti-patterns, and frankly it’s taken a good deal of my time, and sapped much of the desire I had to write in my spare time. We’re currently trying to find a publisher before we continue on with the process, so there’s a bit of a breather.

While I’ve got some “spare time” I decided it was high time I got more familiar with the Google Web Toolkit, or GWT.  I worked quite extensively with AJAX applications back at Lontra, and have some familiarity with a number of them, but was only extensively versed with SmartClient, a commercial AJAX toolkit.   GWT has the nice advantage of being free.

Since I’ve been coaching teams in agile adoption at my current client, and they have a problem getting dedicated space for their teams, I thought a good thing to build would be a virtual “card wall,” where you can drag stories from “not started” to “in progress” and eventually to “done.”  ThoughtWorks has a product somewhat similar to this called Mingle, which I’ve not really looked at very much, since I don’t want it to taint my ideas just yet.

Being familiar with the Java technology stack, I opted to use Spring 2, and for a change of pace I’m using iBATIS rather than Hibernate for this go-round.  For persistence, I’m using PostgreSQL.  It’s still a work-in-progress at this point, but making it’s way along.  I’ll share screenshots as it progresses, if there’s interest.

So that’s why I’ve been absent for so long.  I’ve been monitoring all the usual sources of input (i.e. groups and whatnot) but haven’t really felt the need to say much.  I joined the CISSP Yahoo Group, and man, what a bunch of chatterers those lot are.  I’m seriously thinking of un-subbing that one.

As a parting thought, anyone have any good suggestions for e-groups in Chicago, Milwaukee or Madison for Agile, J2EE, Enterprise Architecture or IT Security?

I love Nerf guns, and I really miss working in an environment where cubicle warfare is a remote possibility. Working as a consultant, it’s simply not possible, unfortunately. I’d always thought that the Nerf crossbow was the pinnacle of Nerf-dom, but imagine my delight when I discovered that those witty Nerf engineers have finally brought out a fully automatic Nerf!

Nerf Vulcan Fully Automatic Dart Gun Now Available [Gizmodo]

I’ve thought for years that many reviews were just poorly done, and like a wayward child, could maybe be rescued.  I’ve changed my opinion, reviews, as practiced today, are pretty much beyond redemption, and the do more harm than good.

Read more

Why is it so difficult to get people to collaborate? When coaching agile projects, we always advocate that people collaborate rather than try to find ways to avoid talking to one another, such as by writing documents and making people read them.

The development teams are usually all over this. They want to collaborate with people who they need things from, such as the business owner in order to better understand the requirements. They’d rather just ask questions of a live body than read a document. Oh, sure, occasionally at first they don’t really want to talk to “those other people,” developers do tend to be introverts after all.  Usually once they try it they think it’s much better than the old ways.

Why, then, is it so hard to get the developers to collaborate with people who want the things they produce? I’m thinking specifically here about the usual suspects, I suppose, the database organization, the testing organization, and any sort of compliance/oversight organization. These are the same organizations who usually have a dim view of agile to begin with, for reasons I’ve talked about before. Why is it so hard to convince an development team (and I’m intentionally not saying a ‘project team’ because they don’t have all the right people) to invite someone, such as a tester, to one of their meetings, when in turn they want to be part of requirements meetings?

You could be forgiven for thinking that once they’d seen the value of working collaboratively, rather than focusing on documents and hand-offs, they’d naturally want to start doing more of it, extending that approach to people down stream from them in the development process. Strangely, that doesn’t seem to be the truth, I get a great amount of pushback when I suggest this type of thing.

I don’t think this is a case of “you should change, but I don’t need to,” since the developers are  already changing the way that they work. To me, a more compelling explanation is that they don’t want to confront someone who may be hostile to the way that they’re working. This is probably particularly hard when they’re new to agile, and they’re not used to working this way yet. But you’d think that having seen the advantages, and wanting to maximize the amount of work not done, they’d push the envelope more than they seem willing to.

Even more surprising is when it’s suggested, I get pushback on collaborating! “We don’t want to waste their time,” they tell me, or “It’s not their meeting, it’s ours.”

I guess life is just full of people behaving in ways that seem harmful to themselves, and that surprises me.