Every developer has done it. We just needed a bit of XML parsing or a better utility for dealing with connections. So we downloaded a library, stuck it in our code base and used it. It feels good, but reusing software without testing and managing it is risky. This article presents a strategy for managing reuse.

Read more...

We've made our last two Webinars available for playback at your convenience.

• Death to Manual Deployments: Manual deployments are slow, inconsistent and fail in production. Other than that, they're fine. Listen to Jeffery Fredrick and Eric Minick as they discuss what's wrong with Manual Deployments, why Automated Deployments are better and best practices for building on automation.
• Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy: Teams today are challenged by the need to get much more done without dramatically increasing headcount. Join Jeffery and Eric as they share techniques for applying tools from Lean manufacturing to the build and deployment processes.

Jeffery and I have recieved a deluge of requests for replays of our latest Webinar. We have a little processing to do, but it will be made available and we will post a link from here. We expect to have it to you guys by Tuesday at the latest. Thanks for all the great feedback and enjoy your weekends!

This Thursday, Jeffery and I will be presenting "Death to Manual Deployments" a free webcast.

Join us in this webinar to learn:

    • The pitfalls of manual deployments
    • Cultural barriers to improving deployment processes
    • Best practices, such as self-service deployments

We find that many software projects stumble over the deployment hurdle. Many enterprise software projects struggle achieving consistent deployment across their environments --– from Test to UAT to Staging to Production. Consistent deployments must account for differences between environments; coordinate development teams and environment owners; balance schedule pressures; and create the requisite audit trail. When these challenges are compounded by error prone, inconsistent and inefficient manual processes, achieving a consistent deployment can seem impossible. The cost of this struggle is lost time, late breaking defects, and uncertainty.

The good news is that you don’t need to choose between a careful, rigorous approach and speedy but slapdash one. It is possible to implement a solution that provides consistency and audit trails while improving productivity for your release engineers, operations personnel, and testers. In this webinar, we go beyond the whys of consistent automated deployments and examine best practices, helpful tools and common pitfalls encountered when seeking consistent deployments across environments.

Brian Kelly took time out on New Year's Day to let people know about a new CI Build Monitor he's been working on. According to his blog entry he already had one written with Quartz Composer but wanted to make it available cross-platform (and he wanted to learn Processing) so he now also has a version written in Processing. Both versions are available via his github project.

Neat!

To kick off the new year, I put together a little plugin to address the age old problem: "Hey, how can I use my application's property file settings to change AnthillPro's behavior?" Ok, so most of you don't have that problem. But some of you do and it's a pain.

The ahptool command line widget available in 3.7 allows properties to be set from the agent but takes its input as an XML document.

Read on to see how this works in a video and download the plugin (compatible with AnthillPro 3.7+).

Read more...