December 10, 2005
Ant
Yah, it has been a while, but I have been doing all sorts of stuff. Right now I am concentrating on ant. I wouldn't be concentrating on ant if import could be used within a target (why can't it). I was generating a file that needs to be imported. Unfortunately, if the file isn't there, you can't compile. I want this to be a single button thing, so now my ant task (which worked just fine thank you) has to generate a path.
All of this will help me when I start my next story - I have 3 projects right now, the next story is the first story in the second project. The ant stuff I am doing now could go opensource (it is a replacement for the eclipseclasspath plugin). The next stuff is DOD, so I probably will not be blogging about it.
I got two books on ant. Luckily, the O'Reilly book has been updated. I am taking notes for a possible book. I am a smart person - and it is not easy for me to figure out path oriented tasks.
Posted by liz at 09:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 16, 2005
Strange but true
I work with a group that has really bought into Agile development (and Crystal). 15 of us in one big room, with a bunch of computers. Lots of bulletin boards and white boards. Lots of color coded index cards. The room I dreamed about in my last job.
Everybody here pairs (except me). Everybody uses agile techniques (I use some of them). Everybody else knows what stories they are working on. My job changes every day (and I like it that way).
I find this strange because I am the person who is supposedly building the tools to make life easier for the programmers. It seems that I am also the new Subversion Queen. I am writing (or helping with) the opensource code, on a project that is as not opensource as a government project can be.
All of this would be ok, but I am not getting any practice on stories and iterations - and I was weak on them to begin with. I am putting X-Planner through its paces, but I don't do enough agile work to really test the code. So, other programmers here tell me what they need changed.
I have offered to teach Ant for grownups if anybody is interested. I really don't want to be a single point of failure. Of course, I never really wanted to become an Ant specialist either.
Posted by liz at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
Build/release
Until we find somebody who wants to do it, I have been named acting Build/Release Engineer at my new shop. This is to go along with my more formal title of Toolsmith and person who is available for anybody to work with (I guess that isn't a real title). They decided that I was the best person to be the acting B/R person because I am terribly interested in getting agile to play nicely with CMMI 3 (moving to CMMI 4 in the next year). Reasonable decision.
But, as usual, there is a problem here. I have No idea what a build/release engineer does when you also have 2 configuration engineers on the project. For some reason, I can't see how you can be one without being the other. Right now, I am automating the build process, but I would be doing that anyway in my role as toolsmith. If anybody who reads this (and there aren't that many readers) has a good definition of what the various people do - I would love to read the defs.
Maven2: We are giving up on maven 2 except for library management. I don't like a whole lot of things about it, but what I dislike the most is that it seems to believe that if you are managing with maven, you want to manage everything with maven. Well, all of you maven people, I don't want maven writing over my classpath file. I want it to update it. I don't want it to overwrite my project file either. And I certainly am not going to trust my code to a project that is averaging 100 bugreports a day after it is released. It is nice that they decided to rewrite maven - but they need better quality control.
I am refactoring the stuff I wrote 2 weeks ago. My partner in crime (even if he is across the whole damn country) is trying to get me to look at ivy. I am not sure if we can get Ivy to do what he seems to want it to do.
I got XPlanner working today. I am going to install it on a real machine tomorrow. I then will decide what we want to do with it.
Posted by liz at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack