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“Maybe we would be better off if we developed a list of ‘fairly good’ practices, spent time selecting ones appropiate to our organization, and then tailored them to a particular situation.” - Jim Highsmith in Agile Software Development Ecosystems

Originally this project started out as observations of working in an extreme programming shop and the differences between what I experienced, what I read, and the world I had come from. But I realized that there is enough written about XP already, and everyone’s experiences are different. What I also realized is that we do a lot of things that work, some of them mentioned by the agile community, but none of them with the focus and attention that XP gets. So here, for you to pick and choose from, are some ‘fairly good’ practices that have made a difference.

http://fairlygoodpractices.com

The gap between developers and managers often leads to communication problems that lead to failed projects and strained relations. While many managers were developers earlier in their careers, most have grown out of touch with developers’ current technologies, languages, and concerns because they have been focusing on management. Likewise, developers tend to be out of touch with management because developers are typically so focused on development that they have little time left to worry about the issues that most concern management.

Adam Kolawa

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9024/ddj0402h/0402h.htm

The process of developing a solution architecture and successfully implementing it through development and deployment phases requires that performance be considered from the start. With any solution, the overall coordination and performance of the solution components need to execute well together in order for the solution to be truly utilized in a production environment. New technologies are often marketed with grand promises to solve business problems, but if not employed properly with a mind toward operational efficiency, they can result in response time and scalability issues for your solutions. With the introduction of Web services as an open standards integration technology for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business to Business (B2B) Integration, you can do many things to promote operational efficiencies and thus ensure the successful architecture and deployment of a solution. This article shares real-world experiences and suggestions for how best to architect, develop, and deploy Web services-based solutions.

Holt Adams

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-best9

PyRXP is a DTD validating XML parser developed by ReportLab. It is Python wrapper around RXP, a C parser developed by Richard Tobin and Henry Thompson of the Edinburgh Language Technology Group as the core of LT XML, “an integrated set of XML tools and a developers’ tool-kit, including a C-based API”. ReportLab is a vendor of database reporting software and very well known and respected in the Python community. PyRXP is a core component of many of ReportLab’s open source and commercial components. PyRXP focuses on performance above all things by using a fast C parser and by strictly building a bare-bones Python structure of tuples and string buffers from XML source. RXP and PyRXP are both distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Uche Ogbuji

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/11/py-xml.html

Harald Haller reports experience in successfully designing two large .NET applications in C#, a database maintenance system and a real estate investment system. A common three-tier system architecture has been applied in these Web-based applications.

Harald Haller

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2004_02/article1

Developing any nontrivial middleware-based distributed system is hard, regardless of the middleware technology. Although technology’s continuous march should make systems easier to develop, somehow the details always remain challenging. New technologies only seem to make simple things simpler; they don’t help with the more complex things. Horizontal concerns, such as security, transactions, fault tolerance, load balancing, and enterprise management, never seem to get easier, regardless of what middleware development platform you choose.

Steve Vinoski

http://dsonline.computer.org/0401/d/w1tow.htm

Everyone knows what a mock is, just from the name, but as with many seemingly simple ideas, there is more to them than first meets the eye. This article explores the two types of mocks that exist and covers some of the problems inherent in their use. Finally, it considers the reason why a developer might chose to use mocks. After all, common understanding holds that mocks are used for unit testing, a key part of Test Driven Design, but that isn’t necessarily about testing at all.

Simon Stewart

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/02/11/mocks.html

In recent months many organizations have begun to focus attention on Model Driven Architecture (MDA)1 as an approach to application design and implementation. This is a very positive development for several reasons. MDA encourages efficient use of system models in the software development process, and it supports reuse of best practices when creating families of systems. As defined by the Object Management Group (OMG), MDA is a way to organize and manage enterprise architectures supported by automated tools and services for both defining the models and facilitating transformations between different model types.

This article is Part I of a three-part series that will cover: how modeling is used in industry today and the relevance of MDA to today’s systems (Part I); a classification of MDA tooling support (Part II); and examples of MDA’s use in the context of IBM’s model-driven development technology (Part III).

Alan Brown

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/3100.html

By the time this article is published, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers will be nearing the end of their seven-month journey to the red planet. Once Spirit and Opportunity are safely on the ground, mission operators at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will use a suite of software tools to analyze data acquired by the rovers and direct their activities. The development of one of these tools, the Science Activity Planner,1 relied extensively on open source software components. This article describes the lessons learned from the development of SAP and discusses how open source software can play an integral role in mission-critical software development both inside and outside NASA.

Jeffrey S. Norris

http://www.computer.org/software/homepage/2004/s1nor1.htm

Velocity is a versatile, open source templating solution that can be used standalone in report generation/data transformation applications, or as a view component in MVC model frameworks. In this article, Sing Li introduces Velocity and reveals how you can integrate its template-processing capabilities into your own client-side standalone application, server-side Web application, or Web services.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-velocity/

The AUIML Toolkit provides software development tools that allow developers to write an application once and run it in Java Swing or on the Web without any changes. The AUIML Toolkit includes the AUIML VisualBuilder, which is an Eclipse-based visual panel editor built on top of the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. The AUIML VisualBuilder allows developers to easily build user interfaces and generate Java data and event-handling code for them. Additional Java code can be written to AUIML’s API to control application flow, data validation, and to listen for events. Once the application is implemented, it can be deployed as a Java Swing application or as an HTML servlet without changing the application’s code.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/auiml?Open&ca=daw-hp-pr

This book with the title ‘How to survive in the jungle of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks’ is describing the dilemma of creating or choosing an Enterprise Architecture Framework. Several popular EA frameworks are described with their specific characteristics and an overview of the supporting EA Tools is given.

Jaap Schekkerman

http://www.enterprise-architecture.info/EA_Book_EAFrameworks.htm

As the commercial production of software systems moves towards being a traditional industry, automation will necessarily play a more substantial role in this industry, just as it plays a key role in the production of traditional commodities such as garments, automobiles, chemicals, and electronics. GPCE is a conference promoting the application and innovation of foundational techniques for supporting automatic program generation.

Papers can be submitted until March 19, 2004.

Eelco Visser

http://gpce04.gpce.org

Nederland heeft eigen onderzoek naar software-engineering broodnodig, stelden vooraanstaande wetenschappers uit dit veld onlangs in Automatisering Gids. In dit thema voorbeelden van dat onderzoek in het kader van het Jacquard-programma. Onderzoek dat van vitaal belang wordt geacht voor de kenniseconomie. Met als onderzoeksthema’s: architectuur, configuratiebeheer, alignment, en kwantificering van kwaliteit. Oordeel zelf.

Focus: overheid

Wat betekenen de plannen van het Nederlandse kabinet Balkenende II voor het gebruik van ict? En waarom doen de Belgen het beter?

http://www.informatie.nl