What’s with the DevOps hype?
Someone asked at one of the forums if the DevOps hype is justified – after all “it’s something we’ve been doing for the last 20 years”… It’s a good question and here’s what I have to say: DevOps isn’t new, but the hype around it is all about the ever-growing amount and speed of change in the development process. We’ve seen large shifts in development methodologies and release strategies over the last 5-10 years – towards shorter cycles, continuous delivery, automated testing, etc. New tools and practices have been established to deal with these new requirements and organizations now clearly see the competitive advantage they provide. So yes, the discipline itself isn’t new, but it’s role in the software manufacturing process is becoming more visible and acknowledged than ever. That’s what the hype is about. //
Automating Eclipse-based BlackBerry project with Ant
This blog is taking a new turn as I’m taking on a new job currently dealing with build automation for mobile development and Macintosh development. The first project I had to deal with was automating the build for a BlackBerry application originally developed in Eclipse with Blackberry plugin. I chose to automate the build with Ant with the help of the wonderful bb-ant-tools package. There are a number of tutorials giving a nice overview of how this is done, so I won’t describe the basics – you can visit the following links for that: http://www.slashdev.ca/2007/05/30/blackberry-development-with-ant-eclipse http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Java-Development/How-to-use-bb-ant-tools-with-Eclipse-without-the-Eclipse-plugin/m-p/123689 By the way, I built the whole thing on a windows 2007 VM and I did install Eclipse Galileo with BlackBerry plugin and BlackBerry Java SDK version 4.6.0.23. I needed this to check how the project is built with Eclipse and to make sure that the changes I insert don’t mess up the Eclipse…
Automation is for the Lazies!
In my overview of build automation benefits I already stated that it leads to “Less job burnout due to routine tasks”. That’s another way to say – automation is good for us lazy folks! 🙂 Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy. Especially when it comes to long repetitive tasks with a lot of small steps that are easy to forget. Like closing a release baseline or cleaning my apartment. Alas, we can’t automate the apartment cleaning (as yet), but we can, and should be lazy about SDLC tasks. So how do you go about this? Well, first of all – get out these annoying checklists with all the steps needed to close that baseline, prepare that installation kit, merge that branch into the main stream, etc. Don’t have the checklists? It’s all in your head?! Well, you’ll have to write it down now – this will be…