As a consultant, I get to see a lot of different organizations and work with a variety of teams. By now, virtually everyone has at least heard of agile and read the manifesto.  We also seem to have, in technology adoption terms, crossed the chasm, and so adoption by more traditional, sometimes slower moving, global scale organizations is well under way.  Agile has finally been vetted by the early adopters and is now becoming mainstream. I, like others, talk about the difference between “doing Agile” and “being agile”—differing the big “A” agile and the little “a” agile is intentional[BC1] .  From…

You’d think that once I’ve blogged about something, everyone in the universe would be on board with it immediately. I mean, like, obviously, right? So, I wrote about the differences between information radiators and information vaults, and yet many people still assume that the use of tactile tools in a team room for process visualization conflicts with the use of electronic tools as systems of record, or that the two represent duplicate effort for the same value. Go figure. The bad news is a close family member had to get surgery recently. The good news is the hospital staff uses…

Where were we? Part 1: Command-line utilities and wrapper scripts Part 2: Guard (with Ruby) and SBT (with Scala) Part 3 (this): Infinitest (with Java and IntelliJ IDEA) In Part 1, we looked at some simple continuous checking solutions based on shell commands and wrapper scripts. In Part 2, we climbed up the pile of tools a bit and tried out guard (Ruby) and sbt (Scala). Now we’ll have a look at Infinitest for Java, with JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. Infinitest was one of two continuous checking tools for Java that came out in the early 2000s; the other was Kent…

Where were we? Part 1: Command-line utilities and wrapper scripts Part 2 (this):Guard (with Ruby) and SBT (with Scala) Part 3: Infinitest (with Java and IntelliJ IDEA) In Part 1, we looked at some simple continuous checking solutions based on shell commands and wrapper scripts. Let’s start climbing the tool pile and see what we find. Guard for Ruby Guard exemplifies the next level “up” from plain command-line tools. In the Ruby world there are several continuous unit testing tools, of which two are significant and widely-used: ZenTest and guard. ZenTest is a suite of four tools, of which autotest…

Part 1 (this): Command-line utilities and wrapper scripts Part 2: Guard (with Ruby) and SBT (with Scala) Part 3: Infinitest (with Java and IntelliJ IDEA) Back in the day, we used to run compile, link, and execute steps separately and manually (after walking 15 miles to and from school in a snowstorm, uphill both ways). As integrated development environments (IDEs) matured, they wrapped those steps so that we needn’t do them manually over and over again. That was a great step forward, as we could maintain our focus on solving the problem at hand without being distracted by mechanical details…