Archive for January, 2007

The Agile Manifesto is often only partially quoted

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

If I was to ask you to quote the Agile Manifesto what would you say?

  • People and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, whilst there is value in those items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

That’s what I’d say and what I’ve heard others say, however it isn’t actually all of the Agile Manifesto, there are a couple more lines at the start.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

It’s a shame these get missed because there is a lot in them. “We are uncovering”, note the tense here, it is present not past, it is still ongoing, we are still learning. “Better ways” – by saying better rather than best it’s acknowledged that this isn’t the definitive answer or that any previous methods didn’t work at all. “By doing it and helping other do it” – this is not some untested theory, this has been reached through real world experience.

Posted in Agile, Agile Manifesto | 1 Comment »

junit.jar and Ant

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

At last no more messing about copying junit.jar or modifying your system classpath to get JUnit to work with Ant. Version 1.7 allows you to specify its location in a classpath element in your build file.

See the last point from the manual page for the JUnit task:

Note: You must have junit.jar available. You can do one of:
1. Put both junit.jar and ant-junit.jar in ANT_HOME/lib.
2. Do not put either in ANT_HOME/lib, and instead include their locations in your CLASSPATH environment variable.
3. Add both JARs to your classpath using -lib.
4. Specify the locations of both JARs using a element in a in the build file.
5. Leave ant-junit.jar in its default location in ANT_HOME/lib but include junit.jar in the passed to . (since Ant 1.7)

One thing to be careful of, make sure you include the junit.jar file that you want, you probably want to make the classpath element specifying the location of the junit.jar file the first classpath element in your junit task – I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out why the tests annotated with the new JUnit 4 @Test annotation weren’t getting run only to eventually find a JUnit 3.1 junit.jar file from the Spring Framework in the classpath before the JUnit 4 junit.jar file.

Posted in Ant, JUnit, Java, Unit Testing | No Comments »