Blog Insights

One of the best software development conferences you can attend is the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) conference. The conference  is small and the speakers are mostly consultants working in the field.  I attended my 9th NFJS conference this year, and as always, came away with some great information that...

I had the opportunity to present at the eleventh Iowa Code Camp on June 8, 2013.  The title of my presentation was "Easy Acceptance Testing." The purpose of the presentation was to discuss an acceptance testing framework that Source Allies, Inc. developed for a partner while working on a large...

Do you ever wish that companies would trust their employees and business partners instead of insulating themselves with contracts and policies?  For many companies, each discipline operates out of its own department requiring other areas to document exactly what they want and what they are going to do.  This provides...

If you've tried to create an NUnitAddin that works with Resharper you quickly found that it simply doesn't work.  In fact, it's been confirmed that Resharper does not currently support NUnit EventListener addins.  While this is true, I've found a work around that works very nicely. Instead of adding an EventListener...

ThoughWorks Studios has released an ebook titled "How do you estimate on an Agile project?" where they explore common approaches and their adaptions from real-world projects.  The book is comprised of several authors, most notably Martin Fowler. In this ebook they discuss why teams estimate, different methods that teams use...

Over the last year or so software development estimates have become a popular topic.  The popularity stems from the inherent fact that estimating software development is difficult.  Some people are writing about ways to improve your estimates while others are writing about how to manage software development without estimates. Those writing...

Now we will cover the fun stuff for which we've been waiting. In this post, I'll go over how to setup Sonar for a Java project that utilizes Ant for its build.  I'll go through the basic steps for installing and running a Sonar instance, and how to use a...

Do you sometimes feel like your team spends more time documenting your system than building it?  One of the biggest hindrances to progress in a software project is documentation. The Agile Manifesto prescribes that teams should value working software over comprehensive documentation. It doesn’t mean that you should not create documentation;...

Please note that wherever required I'll be using the Apache Abdera project from the nemo instance to illustrate some features and functionality available in Sonar. To find the Apache Abdera project you can do one of the followings: Sonar and its metrics are about improving the code quality. That is, they are for positive...

If you haven’t heard of Git or don’t understand why you should use it, checkout the talk given by the author to Google (Torvalds, 2007). Git is an excellent version control tool for agile software development. But many of us may not have the luxury of using Git because our company has...