Andy Palmer

Have you tried to get your FitNesse reports into Hudson? Although it’s simple to get an Ant task to run the tests, and fail the build, it would be nice to see the results in Hudson’s junit report. Unfortunately FitNesse outputs it’s results in a format that Hudson doesn’t understand. But that’s OK, because it’s [...]

Following on from my Installing Eclipse post, I put together an empty workspace using my recommendations, as well as a couple from the Ivan Moore and Mike Hill session Programming in the Small. Unzip the template into your workspaces directory and rename it to whatever you want your new workspace to be called. When you [...]

I was talking to someone who had had a project manager mention in a retrospective that he felt that the testing was slowing down the delivery. They wanted to stop “wasting time” on testing and refactoring. When I heard this, I said “That’s a bit like going on a car journey and your passenger telling [...]

Earlier today Antony said on Twitter: “stop apologising if your code starts out messy… it’s how it ends up that counts…. you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” I replied: “Code _should_ start out messy. Finding the right places for things is harder when they’re already neatly in the wrong place” If you [...]

I’ve just bought myself a netbook, and following the example set by John Smart with his article on installing Eclipse, I’ll document what I do with a clean install of Eclipse. First Things First I download the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers. The download is less than half the size of the Java EE edition, [...]

It’s a new year, and I thought I would write down some of my goals for the next twelve months. Write more (this includes blogging and code) Present at one or more conferences Help out with the jNarrate open source project, you can follow the jNarrate project on Twitter Further my understanding around NLP Have [...]

During my current day to day role as a coach, I get a lot of opportunity to find out where people are having problems, which things are causing them pain and we can talk about ways to move things forward. Having real problems helps to focus the mind on the pragmatic rather than the academic. [...]

A long time ago, I went on an advanced driving session. One of the things that my instructor taught me was a mnemonic for checks that you should do before every journey. The mnemonic was POWER[1][2], which stands for: Petrol – (or Phuel for diesel cars) check that you have enough Oil – Check the [...]

I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction ‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions It’s a controversial subject; searching Google for checked versus unchecked exceptions reveals a lot of heated discussions both for and [...]

When I’m reading code, there are a number of things that make my job much easier.The most important (in my opinion) is good naming, but how can we choose suitable names?This is the pattern that I am starting to see (and recommend), and I think it is pretty effective. What? How? Who? Why? If we [...]