There’s a popular video game I used to play as a kid called “Asteroids”. The player controls a spaceship in the center of the screen. Asteroids of various sizes move across the screen. If an asteroid that is too large hits the spaceship, it explodes. The player can avoid this by incrementally breaking larger asteroids [...]

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Frank Knight in his dissertation Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921) made a distinction between risk and uncertainty.�
With risk he states you have the ability to project future outcomes on the basis of a probability distribution. In other words, you can estimate the likelihood of a particular event within a reasonably precise confidence interval. This is similar, some of us [...]

Where is that checklist again? I often find myself asking. Over the years, I built up a set of checklists. These lists including tools & methods, are based on my personal experience and they were very effective for teams I’ve worked with, since those teams span over various companies, sizes and even countries, I think these tools also may very well apply to your team.

To reduce duplication and rigidity of the programmer test relationship to implementation code, move away from class and methods as the definition of a “unit” in your unit tests. Instead, use the following question to drive your next constraint on the software:
What should the software do next for the user?
The following coding session will provide [...]

This tutorial builds on the example presented in a previous tutorial. Here we will explore the difference between the Hibernate second-level cache and the standard query cache and how the two can be used in conjunction to reduce the number of database transactions in an application.

This tutorial presents an exploration of the Hibernate second-level cache. By the end, we will have the tools to integrate Ehcache into a web application and to expire its entries at fixed, regular intervals using the Quartz scheduler to run a Spring batch process.

I have been using a tool for some time with clients and teams to find out what software quality attributes the product development team should focus on in the project. ISO standard 9621 describes the quality attributes found in software. The following image shows the 6 categories and specific attributes contained within them.
Before I knew [...]

Project portfolio prioritization is a tough job. Even when times are good, you can’t undertake every project. When times are bad, you not only have to take on fewer new projects, you have to revaluate your portfolio and stop ongoing projects.

This tutorial is an exploration of mapping Hibernate entities that do not correspond directly to database tables onto structures such as views or query results.

It’s the second episode of The Agile Coach, entitled “Establishing Trust”! Skip Angel and Michael Tardiff explore how an Agile coach establishes trust with those she or he is trying to help…and what can happen when that trust is lost.