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  • Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

    - by Riggy
    About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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  • The Solution

    - by Patrick Liekhus
    So I recently attended a class about time management as well as read the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.  Both have been instrumental in helping me get my priorities aligned as well as keep me focused. The reason I bring this up is that it gave me a great idea for a small application with which to create a great technical stack solution that would be easy to demo and explain.  Therefore, the project from this point forward with be the Liekhus.TimeTracker application which will bring some the time management skills that I have acquired into a technical implementation.  The idea is rather simple, but leverages some of the basic principles of Covey along with some of the worksheets that I garnered from class.  The basics are as such: 1) a plan is a must have and 2) write it down!  A plan not written down is just an idea.  How many times have you had an idea that didn’t materialize?  Exactly.  Hence why I am writing it all down now! The worksheet consists of a few simple columns that I will outline below as well as some modifications that I made according to the Covey habits.  The worksheet looks like the following: Status Issue Area CQ Notes P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   The idea is really simple and straightforward; you write down all your tasks and keep track of them along the way.  The status stands for (P)ending, (F)inished or (L)ater.  You write a quick title for the issue and select the CQ (Covey Quadrant) with which the issue occurs.  The notes section is for things that happen while you are working through the issue.  And last, but not least, is the Area column that I added as a way to identify the Role or Area of your life that this task falls within based upon Covey’s teachings. The second part of this application is a simple phone log that allows you to track your phone conversations throughout the day.  All of this is currently done on a sheet of paper, but being involved in technology, I want it to have bells and whistles.  Therefore, this is my simple idea for a project that will allow me to test my theories about coding and implementations.  Stay tuned as the next session will be flushing out the concept and coming up with user stories to begin the SCRUM process. Thanks

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  • SQL: empty string vs NULL value

    - by Jacek Prucia
    I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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  • Is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

    - by Wayne M
    I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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  • Training v. Teaching

    - by Chris Gardner
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/28/training-v.-teaching.aspxAs some of you may know, I recently accepted a position to teach an undergraduate course at my alma mater. Yesterday, I had my first day in an academic classroom. I immediately noticed a difference with the interactions between the students. They don't act like students in a professional training or conference talk. I wanted to use this opportunity to enumerate some of those differences. The immediate thing I noticed was the lack of open environment. This is not to say the class was hostile towards me. I am used to entering the room, bantering with audience, loosening everyone a bit, and flowing into the discussion. A purely academic audience does not banter. At least, they do not banter on day one. I think I can attribute this to two factors. This first is a greater perception of authority. In a training or conference environment, I am an equal with the audience. This is true even if I am being a subject matter expert. We're all professionals. We're all there to learn from each other, share our stories, and enjoy the journey. In the academic classroom, there was a distinct class difference. I had forgotten about this distinction; I had the professional familiarity with the staff by the time I completed my masters. This leads to the other distinction. These was an expectation of performance. At conference and professional training, there is generally no (immediate) grading. This may be a preparation for a certification exam, but I'm not the one responsible for delivering the exam. This was not the case in the academic classroom. These students are battling for points, and I am the sole arbiter. These students are less likely to let the material wash over them, applying the material to their past experiences. They were down taking notes. I don't want to leave the impression that there was no interact in the classroom. I spent a good deal of time doing problems with the class on the whiteboard. I tried to get the class to help me work out the steps. This opened up a few of them. After every conference or training class, I always get a few people that will email me afterward to continue the conversation. I am very curious to see if anybody comes to my office hours tomorrow. However, that is a curiosity that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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  • SQL 2014 does data the way developers want

    - by Rob Farley
    A post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, good that it fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Joey D’Antoni (@jdanton) Ever since I got into databases, I’ve been a fan. I studied Pure Maths at university (as well as Computer Science), and am very comfortable with Set Theory, which undergirds relational database concepts. But I’ve also spent a long time as a developer, and appreciate that that databases don’t exactly fit within the stuff I learned in my first year of uni, particularly the “Algorithms and Data Structures” subject, in which we studied concepts like linked lists. Writing in languages like C, we used pointers to quickly move around data, without a database in sight. Of course, if we had a power failure all this data was lost, as it was only persisted in RAM. Perhaps it’s why I’m a fan of database internals, of indexes, latches, execution plans, and so on – the developer in me wants to be reassured that we’re getting to the data as efficiently as possible. Back when SQL Server 2005 was approaching, one of the big stories was around CLR. Many were saying that T-SQL stored procedures would be a thing of the past because we now had CLR, and that obviously going to be much faster than using the abstracted T-SQL. Around the same time, we were seeing technologies like Linq-to-SQL produce poor T-SQL equivalents, and developers had had a gutful. They wanted to move away from T-SQL, having lost trust in it. I was never one of those developers, because I’d looked under the covers and knew that despite being abstracted, T-SQL was still a good way of getting to data. It worked for me, appealing to both my Set Theory side and my Developer side. CLR hasn’t exactly become the default option for stored procedures, although there are plenty of situations where it can be useful for getting faster performance. SQL Server 2014 is different though, through Hekaton – its In-Memory OLTP environment. When you create a table using Hekaton (that is, a memory-optimized one), the table you create is the kind of thing you’d’ve made as a developer. It creates code in C leveraging structs and pointers and arrays, which it compiles into fast code. When you insert data into it, it creates a new instance of a struct in memory, and adds it to an array. When the insert is committed, a small write is made to the transaction to make sure it’s durable, but none of the locking and latching behaviour that typifies transactional systems is needed. Indexes are done using hashes and using bw-trees (which avoid locking through the use of pointers) and by handling each updates as a delete-and-insert. This is data the way that developers do it when they’re coding for performance – the way I was taught at university before I learned about databases. Being done in C, it compiles to very quick code, and although these tables don’t support every feature that regular SQL tables do, this is still an excellent direction that has been taken. @rob_farley

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  • Think Before You Leap - Life is Dangerous for Change Agents

    - by technodrone
    So you want to introduce agile methods to your team... The following are some "lessons learned" when from someone who advocated agile/scrum to a group that was not ready for it. "Change agents, in my experience, face negative consequences. Sometimes, most of the time at the beginning, it's painful. This is the question you might have to ask yourself. Do you want to be a developer in scrum project or do you want be a scrum master managing the process? I think with proper mentoring/training, you can become good scrum master. But is that what you want? if yes, you can go ahead, take the training. if you want to be a developer, you may not need to be certified  as scrum master. You can just pick up from a book such as Mike Cohn new book Succeeding with Agile, I am reading it now. It's good. In my experience, I did waste my resources by trying to change the culture. It cost me lot. Instead, I should have focused on technical practices that are core to agile. Then look for teams that are good at agile. I would have saved lot of energy, and time. Try baby steps first yourself in the company, and next with the team, starting with technical practices like writing unit tests, SOLID principles, patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, pairing, and peer code reviews. These have inherent pull that can bring collaboration from a team.  Once you see team adaption in core practices, then you can introduce scrum concepts like user stories/task board etc.  This idea of Leading by example seems to be working for most of the agile folks. You can pitch core practices to the manager, and the team, and start showing them how you are doing.  You can put a road map for agile adaption and you can pitch to your manager. I would include need for scrum master training as part of the road map. " I thought about his advice for a couple of weeks and read about the pitfalls of technical debt and the team not having prior awareness of agile methods. The more I read and think about it the more I think he was right.  What do you think?

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  • Our own Daily WTF

    - by Dennis Vroegop
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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  • Innovation for Retailers

    - by David Dorf
    One of my main objectives for this blog is to point out emerging technologies and how they might apply to the retail industry.  But ideas are just the beginning; retailers either have to rely on vendors or have their own lab to explore these ideas and see which ones work.  (A healthy dose of both is probably the best solution.)  The Nordstrom Innovation Lab is a fine example of dedicating resources to cultivate ideas and test prototypes. The video below, from 2011, is a case study in which the team builds an iPad app that helps customers purchase sunglasses in the store.  Customers take pictures of themselves wearing different sunglasses, then can do side-by-side comparisons. There are a few interesting take-aways from their process.  First, they are working in the store alongside employees and customers.  There's no concept of documenting all the requirements then building the product.  Instead, they work closely with those that will be using the app in order to fully understand what's needed.  When they find an issue, they change the software onsite and try again.  This iterative prototyping ensures their product hits the mark.  Feels like Extreme Programming if you recall that movement. Second, they have time-boxed the project to one week.  Either it works or it doesn't, and either way they've only expended a week's worth of resources.  Innovation always entails failure, and those that succeed are often good at detecting failure quickly then adjusting.  Fail fast and fail often. Third, its not always about technology.  I was impressed they used paper designs to walk through user stories and help understand the needs of the customer.  Pen and paper is the innovator's most powerful tool. Our Retail Applied Research (RAR) team uses some of these concepts in our development process.  (Calling it a process is probably overkill.)  We try to give life to concepts quickly so the rest of organization can help us decide if we're heading the right direction.  It takes many failures before finding a successful product.

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  • Top 10 Reasons to Attend the 7th Annual Maintenance Summit

    - by Stephen Slade
    Some of you may be sitting the fence before registering for the Oracle Maintenance Summit 2013. Here are 10 solid reasons to register in the next 3 weeks: 1. It's the 'IN' red carpet maintenance event for 2013. The summit will have one of the greatest concentrations of maintenance best practices, case studies and success stories that can catapult your organization. 2.  Return a Hero! Hear how you can drive reliability and operational excellence back home at the plant!  3. Learn the Roadmap! Hear form product experts who will discuss the vision, strategy and roadmap for Oracle products 4. See Product Demos! All the SCM/EAM rich products will be exhibited by both sales consultants and developers. Ask the hardest question you can think of and be ready for a great response. 5. Meet our Partners! There will be a good number of supporting partners exhibiting at the summit. Hear and learn of what ingredients make for success. 6. Join a panel or discussion group! Raise your hand and be heard – have your questions answered. Contribute to the discussion. 7. Network with your peers. Rub elbows with your fellow maintenance managers and operations supervisors. Talk shop here! 8. 6 Summits under one roof. Hear and share supply chain information at one of the other summits taking place concurrently. Bring other team members and secure the group discount. 9. Save $100, register by Dec 31 for the early bird rate. Hotel will fill fast.  www.oracle.com/goto/vcs 10. Have a great time! The Summit is both informational and enjoyable. Set at the waterfront in downtown San Francisco at the Embarcadero, the summit will be a fun-filled and enjoyable experience.

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  • JavaOne 2013: (Key) Notes of a conference – State of the Java platform and all the roadmaps by Amis

    - by JuergenKress
    Last week’s JavaOne conference provided insights in the roadmap of the Java platform as well as in the current state of things in the Java community. The close relationship between Oracle and IBM concerning Java, the (continuing) lack of such a relationship with Google, the support from Microsoft for Java applications on its Azure cloud and the vibrant developer community – with over 200 different Java User Groups in many countries of the world. There were no major surprises or stunning announcements. Java EE 7 (release in June) was celebrated, the progress of Java 8 SE explained as well as the progress on Java Embedded and ME. The availability of NetBeans 7.4 RC1 and JDK 8 Early Adopters release as well as the open sourcing of project Avatar probably were the only real news stories. The convergence of JavaFX and Java SE is almost complete; the upcoming alignment of Java SE Embedded and Java ME is the next big consolidation step that will lead to a unified platform where developers can use the same skills, development tools and APIs on EE, SE, SE Embedded and ME development. This means that anything that runs on ME will run on SE (Embedded) and EE – not necessarily the reverse because not all SE APIs are part of the compact profile or the ME environment. However, the trimming down of the SE libraries and the increased capabilities of devices mean that a pretty rich JVM runs on many devices – such as JavaFX 8 on the Raspberry PI. The major theme of the conference was Internet of Things. A world of things that are smart and connected, devices like sensors, cameras and equipment from cars, fridges and television sets to printers, security gates and kiosks that all run Java and are all capable of sending data over local network connections or directly over the internet. The number of devices that has these capabilities is rapidly growing. This means that the number of places where Java programs can help program the behavior of devices is growing too. It also means that the volume of data generated is expanding and that we have to find ways to harvest that data, possibly do a local pre-processing (filter, aggregate) and channel the data to back end systems. Terms typically used are edge devices (small, simple, publishing data), gateways (receiving data from many devices, collecting and consolidating, pre-processing, sending onwards to back end – typically using real time event processing) and enterprise services – receiving the data-turned-information from the gateways to further consolidate, distribute and act upon. A cheap device like the Raspberry PI is a perfect way to get started as a Java developer with what embedded (device) programming means and how interaction with physical input and output takes place. Roadmaps The over all progress on Java is visualized in this overview: Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Amis,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,JavaOne,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Watch ON-Demand Oracle's 4th Annual Primavera Virtual Summit

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Did you miss Oracle's 4th Annual Primavera Virtual Summit? Or, maybe you attended the virtual event live, but want to re-watch some presentations or download industry-specific assets - well you can! Watch and visit here, on-demand.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This event is now available On-Demand for your convenience. Feel free to log-in anytime to listen again about: New cloud based PPM solutions presentations. Special Primavera Roadmap presentation- what's new and what's coming. Customer stories highlighting their successes with Primavera Unifier, Oracle Instantis and Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. And don't forget to visit the Resource Library to check out all the latest product information, whitepapers, and demos which are all available to download and read at your convenience. During your visit to the Virtual Summit ON-Demand, we would appreciate you visiting the Networking Lounge and taking a few minutes to fill out the survey. We would really like to hear what you think. You can also visit the Primavera Website for more information about the newest EPPM solutions and offerings.

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  • How to properly document functionality in an agile project?

    - by RoboShop
    So recently, we've just finished the first phase of our project. We used agile with fortnightly sprints. And whilst the application turned out well, we're now turning our eyes on some of the maintenance tasks. One maintenance task is that all of our documentation appears in the form of specs. These specs describe 1 or more stories and generally are a body of work which a few devs could knock over in a week. For development, that works really well - every two weeks, the devs get handed a spec and it's a nice discrete chunk of work that they can just do. From a documentation point of view, this has become a mess. The problem with writing specs that are focused on delivering just-in-time requirements to developers is we haven't placed much emphasis on the big picture. Specs come from all different angles - it could be describing a standard function, it could describing parts of a workflow, it could be describing a particular screen... And now, we have business rules about our application scattered across 120 documents. Looking for any document for a particular business rule or function in particular is quite hard because you don't know which document has this information, and making a change request is equally hard because once again, we are unsure about which spec to make the change. So we have maybe a couple of weeks of lull before it's back to specing out functionality for the next phase but in this time, I'd like to re-visit our processes. I think the way we have worked so far in terms of delivering fortnightly specs works well. But we also need a way to manage our documentation so that our business rules for a given function / workflow are easy to locate / change. I have two ideas. One is we compile all of our specs into a series of master specs broken by a few broad functional areas. The specs describe the sprint, the master spec describe the system. The only problem I can see is 1) Our existing 120 specs are not all neatly defined into broad functional areas. Some will require breaking up, merging etc. which will take a lot of time. 2) We'll be writing specs and updating master specs in each new sprint. Seems like double the work, and then do the devs look at the spec or the master spec? My other suggestion is to concede that our documentation is too big of a mess, and manage that mess going forward. So we go through each spec, assign like keywords to it, and then when we want to search for a function, we search for that keyword. Problems I can see 1) Still the problem of business rules scattered everywhere, keywords just make it easier to find it. anyway, if anyone has any decent ideas or any experience to share about how best to manage documentation, would really appreciate it.

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  • Fusion Middleware Newsletter - October Edition is Now Out

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} From the latest Oracle Fusion Middleware product releases to the Oracle AppAdvantage use case on Cloud and On-Premise Integration to the very latest in Developer corner and more, the October edition of Oracle Fusion Middleware is chock full of information. Catch the latest edition to learn about the highlights in the latest releases for Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Data Integrator 12c; and Oracle WebCenter. While there, don’t miss the latest news and upcoming events for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Developers. Find out who we have in the Team Spotlight this edition and watch the latest customer success stories across the portfolio. Did we miss anything? Would you like to hear more about a particular topic? Let us know. Simply drop us a comment and we’d be sure to discuss that in our next editorial meeting. In the meantime, grab a coffee and enjoy the October edition of the newsletter.

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  • Stange stream of HTTP GET requests in apache logs, from amazon ec2 instances

    - by Alexandre Boeglin
    I just had a look at my apache logs, and I see a lot of very similar requests: GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.24.0 \ NSS/3.13.5.0 zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.2.2 Host: [my_domain].org Accept: */* there's a steady stream of those, about 2 or 3 per minute; they all request the same domain and resource (there are slight variations in user agent version numbers); they come form a lot of different IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, in blocs that belong to amazon ec2 (in Singapore, Japan, Ireland and the USA). I tried to look for an explanation online, or even just similar stories, but couldn't find any. Has anyone got a clue as to what this is? It doesn't look malicious per say, but it's just annoying me, and I couldn't find any more information about it. I first suspected it could be a bot checking if my server is still up, but: I don't remember subscribing to such a service; why would it need to check my site twice every minute; why doesn't it use a clearly identifying fqdn. Or, should I send this question to amazon, via their abuse contact? Thanks!

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  • Java web app deployment and ControlTier adoption

    - by Ran
    I've been searching for a configuration and deployment manager tool for my java-linux based web service and have been looking mainly at ControlTier (http://controltier.org). We operate at a medium scale (100's of hosts, multi-DC, dozens of services). There seem to be be plenty of lower level system admin tools such as chef, puppet, cfengine, bcfg2 and more and my understanding and the reason I'm calling them "low level" is that they are great for system level administration tasks such as setting up a mount, file permissions, users etc but aren't designed, for example for java deployments, which usually come with a build process and special java semantics. In many cases any tool can be used to do anything but if it was not designed for the task it can get uncomfortable. OTOH control-tier seem to have been designed just for that - java application deployments, at least that's what all the tutorials on their site demonstrate but here's the problem - The wiki at http://controltier.org/wiki/ is pretty good and stuffed with examples and the company behind the open source CT product is very responsive (pushy...) however, I'm yet to have seen any material from 3rd party users on the net. No success stories, no detailed blog posts, no best practices, no cheat sheets, not even hate letters, nothing. This plays badly for DTO solutions, CT's sponsor for two reasons, one is that it makes me suspicious what's the reason for the poor adoption? and second, what do I do if I get stuck and there's no help page on CT's wiki page and the mailing list is too slow to answer. I'm stuck with a "free" product that a consultancy company is pushing. So my question here - I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had real world experience with CT for java based web app deployments and if he'd thumb up the product? Any other comments that may enlighten me are welcome of course...

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  • Drobo-like linux file server - how do I do it?

    - by John Hunt
    I've been pondering for a long time about how I can set up a server which operates much like the Drobo storage thing. The reasons I don't actually want a drobo is because I've heard scare stories, plus I'd like to do this on the cheap. So ideally I'm looking for something like lvm so I can create a logical volume that spans many hard disks of varying sizes... obviously that only offers redundancy if I put the LV on a raid array (as far as I know..) I have however been reading about technologies such as Microsoft's drive extender which duplicates files at the filesystem level and makes sure that the mirrored files are on a different phyiscal disk.. does anyone know or recommend a filesystem or method like this as it'll hopefully make much better use of the space available than raid ever could. Performance isn't an issue, I'd just really like to make the most of the hard disks I have lying around whilst having a bit of redundancy incase a disk dies. I understand full well that this is no replacement for a backup, but I'll only be storing files of medium importance and using the nas itself as a backup of my main pc and other systems. Thanks in advance! I'm hoping zfs or btrfs or something can do something clever for me :)

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  • Which HDD brand do you ..trust

    - by Shiki
    Okay it says its 'subjective' but I believe it's not. Basically I want to ask the community about your preference. Not really 'preference' but actual experience. Like if you never had a problem with Western Digital, then write that in an answer, or if there is one with WD, just vote it up. And so on. (Heard so many stories, experiences. I only had Samsung, Maxtor, WD, Seagate HDDs. Samsung died with bad blocks, had anomalies. Maxtor died so fast I couldn't even try it really and it's really hot, loud. Seagate is just as loud as a jet plane, and moderately hot. My WD (green) is quiet, really cool and somewhat fast. That's all I have about experiences. So I would say Western Digital in an answer (OR Hitachi. Never had one yet, but every expert I know says I should get one since they even had problems with WD but Hitachi seems to be ok. (My laptop comes with Hitachi hdd but I don't think its really relevant.)) Basically I mean desktop 7200RPM HDDs here. Well.. notebook HDDs are ok also, but no raptor/scsi/server ones. Hope you get what I meant and it won't get closed.

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  • is ksplice production ready?

    - by faultyserver
    I would be interested to hear the serverfault community's experiences with Ksplice in production. Quick blurb from wikipedia: Ksplice is a free and open source extension of the Linux kernel which allows system administrators to apply security patches to a running kernel without having to reboot the operating system. and Ksplice can, without restarting the kernel, apply any source code patch that only needs to modify the kernel code. Unlike other hot update systems, Ksplice takes as input only a unified diff and the original kernel source code, and it updates the running kernel correctly, with no further human assistance required. Additionally, taking advantage of Ksplice does not require any preparation before the system is originally booted (the running kernel does not need to have been specially compiled, for example). In order to generate an update, Ksplice must determine what code within the kernel has been changed by the source code patch. So a few questions: How has the stability been? any odd issues that you have encountered with its 'rebootless live patching' of the kernel? Kernel panics or horror stories? I have been running it on a few test systems and so far its been working as advertised, but I am interested in what other sysadmins experiences have been with Ksplice before going 'all in' and deploying this on our production servers. So, anybody using Kspice in production? update: hmm, not seeing any real activity on this question after a couple of hours (besides some kind upvotes and favs). Maybe to spark some activity I'll also ask a few more questions and see if we can get this discussion going... "If you are aware of Ksplice, is there a reason you are not using it?" "Do you feel its still too bleeding edge, unproven or untested?" "Does Ksplice not fit well within your current patch-management system?" "Do you hate having systems that have long (and secure) uptimes?" ;-)

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  • What kind of server attacks should i be aware of nowadays

    - by Saif Bechan
    I am recently running a web server, and there is a lot of information online, but it can all be a little confusing. I recently opened my logwatch logs and saw that i get attacked a lot by all sorts of bots. Now I am interested in a list with things I definitely should be aware of nowadays, and possible ways to prevent them. I have read stories about server crashed by floods, crashed by email, and all sorts of crazy stuff. Thing I already did: I have recently blocked all my ports, except for the http and email ports. I disabled IPv6, this was giving me a lot of named errors I have turned on spam DNS blackhole lists to fight spam - sbl.spamhaus.org; - zen.spamhaus.org; - b.barracudacentral.org; I installed and configured mod_security2 on apache There is no remote access possible to my databases That is all i did so far, further I am not aware of any other threats. I want to know if the following things have to be protects. Can I be flooded by emails. How can i prevent this Can there be a break in or flood of my databses Are there things like http floods or whatever Are there any other things i should know before i go public with my server I also want to know if there is some kind of checklist with must-have security protections. I know the OWASP list for writing good web applications, is there something for configuring a server.

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  • ASP.NET Session State SQL Server 2008 R2 Freezes with High CPU Usage

    - by jtseng
    Our ASP.Net website uses SQL Server as the session state provider. We currently host the database on SQL Server 2005 since it does not play well on 2008 R2. We would like to know why, and how to fix it. hardware setup Our current session state server has SQL Server 2005 with the files hosted on a single local disk. It is one of our oldest servers since it has served us well, and we never felt the need to upgrade it. The database is about 2 GB holding 6000 sessions. (The sessions are a little big, but we need it.) We have another server with SQL Server 2008 R2 with a much faster CPU, much more RAM, and a much faster hard disk. situation One day, we have a huge surge in traffic. The transaction log growth on SQL Server freezes the server for 10's of seconds, allowing only a few requests through in minutes. So we load up the new server with ASPState with very large data and log files and point all of our applications to the new server. It chugs along fine for about 5 minutes, and then the CPU usage jumps up to 50% of the 16 cores that Standard Edition can use and freezes for 10's of seconds at a time. The files do not record any autogrowth events. The disk queue is nice and low. RAM usage is low. CPU usage on our old server has never been higher than 5%. What happened on the new server? Alternatively, I would like to hear success stories with ASP.NET session state server running on SQL Server 2008 R2 with an average write load of 30MB/sec with bursts up to 200MB/sec.

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  • What are the "least legally restrictive" well-connected countries to host a website?

    - by monster
    NB: I am aware that this question is subjective, as it can't be defined precisely, but the answers should still be "objective": Country name, and what makes it legally safer. EDIT: A) I am located in Germany. B) I am NOT looking for a place to offer pirated Software/Media; no binary on my site, except "profile icon". Hello! I want to start publishing "social" websites / apps, and I found that the biggest initial problem is this: Any and all services I have to depend on, including Domain Registrar, DNS provider, Server/Cloud Provider, CDN Provider, ... even my Insurance Agent, basically say that they can "throw me out" if my website contains "unacceptable" content. It's always phrased in such a way that basically anything can fall under "unacceptable" content. This is very frustrating because you just can't fully control what users post on your "social website", and you so you basically have to expect when you go to bed that your site is going to be gone when you wake up. I've heard a lot of horror stories about this. Since the "Terms Of Service" of all those providers are foremost to protect themselves from legal actions, and those legal actions depend on the country where they are located, it seems like the first step is to find which country is the "safest" to locate a site. "Safest" being defined as, where I am least likely to get in legal trouble with the local authorities, if some user posts something unacceptable in some way. The main restriction is that it should also be a "well-connected" country, because there is no point in being "safe", if my users can't get to my sites, or the latency is unacceptable. I am targeting the English speaking people in any country as my future users.

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  • What is the quickest and safest way to test new software and revert all changes, if needed?

    - by calbar
    I'm looking for Windows software that will allow me to quickly create a "checkpoint", do whatever I might need to do to my computer - install programs/drivers/updates, create/delete personal files, reboot the system multiple times, open questionable attachments - and then revert the entire system back to when the checkpoint was created. Essentially I want Windows Restore Points that save my personal files and partitions, too. It sounds like disk imaging might be the ticket, but creating them is much too slow and the restore process too involved... I'm hoping to sacrifice full disaster recovery for speed. Creating a checkpoint should be as close to one-click as possible, and rolling back should be a matter of selecting a restore point and rebooting. Ding! I'm familiar with Sandboxie, True Image Home "Try and Decide", Returnil, and a number of other "virtual system" apps that actively "catch" changes and allow you to commit or reject them. I'm not interested in these for a number of reasons - I prefer the "cut and dry" restore point approach. Finally, I'll note that I've just recently become aware of Comodo Time Machine. It sounds absolutely perfect, however, a quick skim through the user forums show more than a few horror stories of corrupted, unbootable systems. Any positive personal experience with the software to suppress my superstitions, or suggestions for more established alternatives would be greatly appreciated - Comodo Time Machine seems relatively new. Thanks for your help!

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  • Scaling databases with cheap SSD hard drives

    - by Dennis Kashkin
    Hey guys! I hope that many of you are working with high traffic database-driven websites, and chances are that your main scalability issues are in the database. I noticed a couple of things lately: Most large databases require a team of DBAs in order to scale. They constantly struggle with limitations of hard drives and end up with very expensive solutions (SANs or large RAIDs, frequent maintenance windows for defragging and repartitioning, etc.) The actual annual cost of maintaining such databases is in $100K-$1M range which is too steep for me :) Finally, we got several companies like Intel, Samsung, FusionIO, etc. that just started selling extremely fast yet affordable SSD hard drives based on SLC Flash technology. These drives are 100 times faster in random read/writes than the best spinning hard drives on the market (up to 50,000 random writes per second). Their seek time is pretty much zero, so the cost of random I/O is the same as sequential I/O, which is awesome for databases. These SSD drives cost around $10-$20 per gigabyte, and they are relatively small (64GB). So, there seems to be an opportunity to avoid the HUGE costs of scaling databases the traditional way by simply building a big enough RAID 5 array of SSD drives (which would cost only a few thousand dollars). Then we don't care if the database file is fragmented, and we can afford 100 times more disk writes per second without having to spread the database across 100 spindles. . Is anybody else interested in this? I've been testing a few SSD drives and can share my results. If anybody on this site has already solved their I/O bottleneck with SSDs, I would love to hear your war stories! PS. I know that there are plenty of expensive solutions out there that help with scalability, for example the time proven RAM-based SANs. I want to be clear that even $50K is too expensive for my project. I have to find a solution that costs no more than $10K and does not take much time to implement.

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  • Cisco configuration for public library internet

    - by AlternateZ
    I'm a C/C++ computer programmer turned IT support guy working for a public library. My day is usually spent helping random grandparents learn how to use email, so my networking knowledge is limited to what I can glean from google. Here's the situation. We have a public library with 20 PCs on a LAN and also public wifi access. Previously we were running all of this on 1 ADSL connection and people complained about low speeds. We hired a networking company to set up a Cisco dual-WAN router for us, and purchased an additional ADSL connection. The intention was to give the LAN PCs a guaranteed amount of bandwidth each, and then let the wifi users split the rest. The results were far worse than what we expected, and all we got from the company was excuses and they've since washed their hands of us. During busy periods, net performance on the LAN PCs are so poor that attaching files to gmail etc often times out and fails - far from the "guaranteed amount of bandwidth each" that we hope for! Sometimes it feels like performance is worse than before when we had 1 ADSL link and an unconfigured router? Anyways, surely this is a problem encountered a million times over across the world? (Sharing internet across many users effectively.) What are standard solutions for something like this? I admit to not even knowing the right jargon to google for (load balancing?) I'd appreciate any links to resources/guides that might help me get a better understanding of the problem/solutions, and perhaps some stories of your own experience in solving similar problems. This will help us evaluate and negotiate with network consultants in the future. If its relevant, our router config contains a section "policy-map" with "bandwidth percent" for each class of user (LAN, wifi), and "fair queue".

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