Although we at Redstream are developing software in an agile way for years we recently started to do it the Scrum way. We already knew the theory about Scrum but we really got excited when we attended to the ScrumMaster course lead by Jeff Sutherland himself.

And now, while we are a few sprints underway, I must say it really makes the job even more fun! We deliver what we said we would, with the quality we agreed upon and on time. In my opinion the biggest advantage of using Scrum is the avoidance of creating waste. I noticed that the team is building what is asked for and nothing more, whereas in the old days we would tend to build extra functionality we thought would be handy in the future. But, as we were told during the training, almost 2/3 of the functionality that is built in a system (not using Scrum of course) is rarely or never used, so this is a great way to improve the productivity.

I’ve been brainwashed for two days by Scrum Trainer Arlen Bankston and Scrum Practitioner and Agile coach Marco Mulder to get the Product Owner certificate. Don’t take me wrong, this was not a punishment but more an eye-opener for someone like me who has been working in IT for more than 25 years and only is familiar with traditional project management tools like PRINCE2.

I am used to put together a business case and defend this by heart to get the commitment and necessary funding from a project board to start a project. Scrum has another approach; “Just give me the money and we make this work”.
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Currently we’re evaluating the Mule Management Console: a new product from MuleSoft that replaces Mule HQ.
We have had a look at Mule HQ before and decided that it was not offering the functionality we were looking for. Apparently we weren’t the only ones with this conclusion because MuleSoft decided to build a new Management Console from scratch. It is now available as an Early Access release and MuleSoft asked us to evaluate it.

As soon as we have set up a test environment (similar to our live situation) and done our first tests we will post the results here so stay tuned!

XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This series of posts is about mistakes (or at least clumsiness) in using XML that I noticed during several projects.

No use of versions in namespaces (more…)

XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This series of posts is about mistakes (or at least clumsiness) in using XML that I noticed during several projects.

Not making (useful) use of namespaces
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XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This series of posts is about mistakes (or at least clumsiness) in using XML that I noticed during several projects.

Only change the syntax of the CSV file (no normalization)
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XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This post is about one of the mistakes I noticed during one of my projects.

Not using a schema (XSD) or DTD
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As posted here I have been busy last few weeks studying for my upcoming exam to become Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services. Well, the exam was today and I am happy to announce I made it :-). So I can finally remove this one from my wish list. Oh, and for the JAXR part of the exam I had 100% score… Would that be coincidence or because I had been playing around with JAXR and jUDDI???

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