Messing with Selenium and Watir

Posted on November 11, 2008 by mikewitters — 1 Comment

Wow… long time since I posted. We have an application that is getting ready to go live for the customers of my customers and I wanted to do some load testing of the solution. The application was written by a contracting firm and was written using AJAX and RichFaces. The RichFaces and AJAX part adds complications to the conversation between client and server making it hard for tools to be used for automated activites. This posed a problem for me when I wanted to load test it. Read more ›

Posted in Agile, code, java, OpenSource, SoftwareDev

Agile IT Experience… 5 closing thoughts.

Posted on June 29, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

I’ve been home from the Agile IT Experience for almost 24 hours now. I’ve had enough time to recover from the travel and lack of sleep. So, thinking back about the conference I have a few thoughts. Read more ›

Posted in Agile, code, java, ProfessionalStuff, SoftwareDev

Agile IT Experience, Day two

Posted on June 27, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

The day is over. The bar is still going strong… and no smoke tonight!!! But I’m done. I spent enough dough (my own) and my boss and I had enough conversation that it was time to call it a night. We have a long drive home tomorrow… after two more sessions in the morning.
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Posted in Agile, code, ProfessionalStuff

Agile IT Experience, Day one

Posted on June 26, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

The day is over. The bar is still going strong, but too much smoke for me… and I’ve been in enough sessions on the day after a night of partying at a conference and I just dont have it in me anymore (Getting old I guess). So I ordered one last cold one to go and decided to write a few lines in the blog about today’s sessions.

Posted in Agile, code, ProfessionalStuff, Uncategorized

Off to Agile IT Experience Tomorrow.

Posted on June 24, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

Well, a colleague and I are off to Agile IT Experience in Reston, VA tomorrow. It runs Thursday, Friday, and a half day Saturday. Im so ready for it. There look to be a lot of very good sessions and I plan on attending all of them that I can.

Posted in Agile, code, mikewitters.com, ProfessionalStuff, SoftwareDev

The sleepy software bug.

Posted on June 18, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

First thing this morning I got an email with ‘high’ priority. The subject was ‘The Learning Center seems to be down’. We’ve been having a lot of problems with the product that underlies our ‘Learning Center’ application lately (we’re currently making a major switch) so I thought it was one of the run-of-the-mill problems we knew exactly how to fix. How wrong I was. Before I explain the story, I should give you some background info…

Cue dreamy effect and go back in time…

Posted in code, LifeLessons, ProfessionalStuff, SoftwareDev

Small Code Differences

Posted on May 13, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

I enjoyed this post about a scenario where code goes through an evolution based on different types of developers discovering it in succession and applying their own ‘style and wisdom’ to it. The post itself was creative and interesting, but the coolest thing about it are the comments, in my opinion. People are getting downright crazy about it. It just shows how literal, logical, and nutty we software developers really are. To each his/her own!

Posted in ProfessionalStuff, SoftwareDev

Unit Testing: The proving grounds for the team

Posted on May 8, 2008 by mikewitters — 1 Comment

After weeks of development a change in a fundamental aspect of the domain has surfaced. To outsiders (read: the business) this change may seem insignificant, but to people who write lines of code, it is understandably a relatively big issue.

Posted in Agile, code, java, SoftwareDev

Value Objects vs Tool/Framework Bean Req’s

Posted on May 8, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

A recurring scenario is annoying me. The scenario is this: Create a value object, in the Domain-Driven Design sense, and use it in a Hibernate persisted domain model. Following the DDD style, a value object shouldn’t have a default constructor, because its state should be present upon it’s creation as arguments to its constructor. It should be immutable and have no setters for its state. This won’t work if you’re using any tools/frameworks that require default constructors on the objects in your domain model. Read more ›

Posted in Agile, code, java, SoftwareDev

I'll be heading to Agile ITX this summer

Posted on May 1, 2008 by mikewitters — Leave a comment

For a long time my career had me doing a whole lot of product installations and integrations where domain models and agile development didn’t necessarily fit. Any conferences or training I attended was based on specific product issues Read more ›

Posted in Agile, code, java