Mikado Method – Learn how to eliminate your techical debt

THE MIKADO METHOD

Save 50% on The Mikado Method and these other selected books. Just enter miklaunch50 in the Promotional Code box when you check out. Expires Tuesday, May 23. Only at manning.com. The Mikado Method is a process for surfacing the dependencies in a codebase so that you can systematically eliminate technical debt. It gets its name from a simple game commonly known as “pick-up sticks,” in which you try to remove the Mikado stick without disturbing the others. The game is a great metaphor for eliminating technical debt by carefully extracting each intertwined dependency until you’re able to successfully resolve the central issue and move on. The Mikado Method, a book by the creators of this process, presents a step-by-step system for identifying the scope and nature of your technical debt, mapping the key dependencies, and determining the safest way to approach the Mikado–your goal. A natural byproduct of this process is the Mikado Graph, a minimalistic, relevant, just-in-time roadmap and information radiator that reflects deep understanding of how your system works. WHAT’S INSIDE Understand your technical debt Surface the dependencies in legacy systems Isolate and resolve core concerns while creating minimal disruption Create a roadmap for your changes This book builds on agile processes, such as refachttp://onlysoftware.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=478&action=edittoring, TDD, and rapid feedback. It requires no special hardware or software and can be practiced by both small and large teams. You can also choose… Kanban in Action Sonar in Action Specification by Example Effective Unit Testing Art of Unit Testing, Second Edition Becoming Agile Gradle in Action Continuous Integration in .NET Dependency Injection Dependency Injection in .NET

Sonar (SonarQube) in Action : Track and improve your source’s code quality

Software quality is about a lot more than slinging good code. As a developer you use numerous tools, techniques, frameworks, and processes as you write, organize, build, test, refactor, and continuously improve your applications. Sonar (SonarQube), a free and open source quality platform, makes it radically easier to track, manage, and enhance the overall quality of your code. It leverages respected tools like Findbugs, PMD, and Checkstyle, and implements well-established best practices to provide a full-featured, robust platform for code quality measurement, review, and remediation. Originally Java-only, Sonar now works with many other languages.

The Sonar (SonarQube) in Action book shows developers how to use the Sonar platform to help them continuously improve their source code with practical examples. The book presents Sonar’s core Seven Axes of Quality: design /architecture, duplications, comments, unit tests, complexity, potential bugs, coding rules. You’ll find simple, easy to follow discussion and examples as you learn to integrate Sonar into your development process. Once you’ve used Sonar to identify problems in your code, you’ll learn how to leverage Sonar’s review functionality and IDE integration to make fixing those issues a smooth and transparent process. Sonar boasts an active community with many high-quality contributed plug-ins. If you’re up for it, you’ll learn how to extend Sonar by writing your own plug-ins.

On April 11th ( a couple of months before it hits the shelves) the book Sonar (SonarQube) in Action will be featured as the Deal of the Day. The deal will go live at Midnight US ET and will stay active for ~48 hours. So this your chance to get it at half price. Just use the code dotd0411au when you checkout.

Book’s page at manning.com : Sonar in Action
The Deal of the Day offer also applies to Effective Unit Testing

Sonar 2013 unofficial Survey results

The unofficial Sonar 2013 Survey has completed and you can find its results using the following link. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/16516393/SonarSurvey2013/SonarSurveyResults.rar

Thank you all of you who spend some time filling it.

Part of the survey is also presented below.

Countries

Favorite IDE

 

Which programming language you’d like to be supported in the future by Sonar

 

 

 

Patroklos PAPAPETROU

Co-Author of Sonar in Action Book

Now it’s the right time to learn Gradle,Sonar,Groovy,Grails,Sonar,Unit Testing…

Save 50% on Gradle in Action and these other selected books. Just enter gradlelaunch50 in the Promotional Code box when you check out. Expires Thursday, February 7. Only at manning.com.   Gradle is the next step in JVM-based build tools. It draws on lessons learned from established tools like Ant and Maven, incorporating and improving upon ideas like full flexibility and convention over configuration. In Gradle you declaratively model your problem domain using a powerful Groovy DSL instead of cumbersome XML, resulting in expressive, extensible, and testable builds. Gradle in Action is a comprehensive guide to end-to-end project automation with Gradle. Starting with the basics, this practical, easy-to-read book discusses how to build a full-fledged, real-world project. Along the way, it touches on advanced topics like testing, continuous integration, and monitoring code quality. You’ll also explore tasks like setting up your target environment and deploying your software. What’s Inside Gradle from the ground up Practical, real-world examples Transitioning from Ant and Maven In-depth plugin development Continuous Delivery with Gradle No prior experience with Groovy required. Assumes basic knowledge of Java. You can also choose… Effective Unit Testing Test Driven Sonar in Action Specification by Example The Well-Grounded Java Developer DSLs in Action JUnit in Action, Second Edition Art of Unit Testing, Second Edition Making Java Groovy Groovy in Action, Second Edition Grails in Action, Second Edition Spring in Action, Third Edition Spring in Practice Spring Integration in Action Spring Roo in Action Spring Batch in Action

 

 

Code Coverage Tools (JaCoCo, Cobertura, Emma) Comparison in Sonar

For those that are not familiar with Sonar, ( I hope this post will make you at least try it or see it in action at http://nemo.sonarsource.org )  you can take a look at an earlier post I’ve written some time ago. In one sentence Sonar is an open source platform that allows you to track and improve the quality of your source code. One of the key aspects when talking about software quality is the test coverage or code coverage which is how much of your source code is tested by Unit tests. Sonar integrates with the most popular open source code coverage tools ( JaCoCo, Cobetura, Emma ) and the well-known commercial Clover by Attlassian. By default it uses the JaCoCo (Java Code Coverage) engine and you’ll shortly find out why

Before we move on, I’d like to give many kudos to Evgeny Mandrikov. This article is inspired by one of his older posts and its intention is to present a more updated comparison of the supported code coverage tools by Sonar and point out some differences regarding their results and the way they work. Recently Sonar changed its default code coverage tool to JaCoCo and this post tries to explain the reasons behind that decision. Some of the information is borrowed by Evgeny’s post and the image is also taken from Evgeny’s presentation about JaCoCo. So thanks a lot Evgeny!

Now let’s go to the meat. For the comparison you’ll see, I’ve used the latest available Sonar version 3.3, Maven 2.2.1, Java 1.6 and all analysis launched in a Windows 7 machine (Intel Core i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz)  with 8GB RAM. The projects were carefully selected ( a small, medium-sized and a large one – not that large as Java code base but large enough to extract some results ). I ran five analysis for each open source code coverage tool ( I excluded the commercial Clover from my comparison version ) and another five by disabling the code coverage mechanism. So that’s a total of 60 analysis ). In the following tables you can find some information about the code coverage tools and some basic metrics about the selected projects. Pay attention to the date of the latest stable release. Emma hasn’t been updated since dinosaurs era and cobertura is almost three years inactive. One might think that this isn’t an issue  if they are stable and don’t need any new release. Well, the truth is that both of them have bugs that frustrate end-users and there’s no one to fix them. On the other hand JaCoCo is continuously evolving and improving…

 

 

The results of the analysis are displayed next. Some important notices. Emma doesn’t support Branch coverage that’s why you’re not seeing any metrics. Furthermore there are differences in the results of Line and Branch coverage, which are more concrete for larger projects. For instance in Sonar Jira plugin all three tools produce the same results whereas in Sonar analysis and Commons Lang projects you can see that the numbers are not the same.

 

Now take a look at a graph that illustrates in a more readable way which tool is the fastest.

It seems that Emma and JaCoCo need the same amount of time to compute their metrics… but… as we already mentioned there’s a huge difference. There’s no branch coverage in Emma reports.  Cobertura is always slower than JaCoCo so again the winner is JaCoCo. Of course you can get even faster results by running a Sonar analysis without computing code coverage metrics

One last thing: JaCoCo, as the following figure shows is the only tool that analyses bytecode on-the-fly which is more . Cobertura and Emma run an offline analysis and use a class loader whereas JaCoCo has its own java agent for analysis code. This configuration allows JaCoCo to be very flexible, possible integrated with many other tools and frameworks and can be used with any language in a JVM environment.

 

So, to sum up, if you’re using Sonar ( if you don’t , you SHOULD ), then it strongly advisable to keep the default code coverage engine ( JaCoCo) , unless you have really important reasons for that.

Finally don’t forge to check Sonar’s Community 2013 unofficial survey and the upcoming book about Sonar by Manning Publications. The release date is in about 3-4 months but you can get an early access version here.

As always, feel free to comment or suggest improvements about the article and its content.

Patroklos PAPAPETROU

Co-Author of Sonar in Action Book

 

Sonar 2013 Community Survey

It’s time for the Sonar Community to vote for Sonar’s annual survey.
As last year there’s an unofficial survey with 10 Sonar questions regarding the user community.

You are all welcome to reply anonymously to 10 simple Sonar-related questions. I expect that you won’t need more than 5 minutes to complete it.
The survey will be open until 31 of January and the results will be published in a following post some days later.

Just click on the following link and send your responses http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/97WJ92G

Best Regards

Patroklos PAPAPETROU

Co-Author of Sonar in Action Book

 

 

Manning’s Countdown to 2013 – All technical books down to 50% during Christmas

Manning Publications is, IMHO, by far the most professional publisher when talking about technical books. They don’t publish books for every possible technology – I wonder who’s buying books for OpenNI or Yii. They carefully select the topics and all their books are of the highest quality, compact, easy to ready, without “noise”. But the best of all is that every  December they’re giving away free books. This year’s countdown to 2013 has already started with plenty of offers and some guys have already claimed their free books. 

In particular, each Monday is 50% off on a particular type of book. Yesterday was MEAP day!

As a heads up:

Monday Dec 17—Half off all eBooks with code dotd1217au
Monday Dec 24 and Tuesday Dec 25 —Half off any purchase, eBook, pBook, or MEAP with codes dotd1224au and dotd1225au

There’s more about the Countdown to 2013 at http://deals.manningpublications.com/countdown2013.html, including how to get a shot at an iPad Mini !!

In this post I suggest several books for topics that are currently hot and have an increased interest. So here they are!!!

 

1. Software Quality / Metrics
No matter what’s your favorite language, your programming style, your build tool, your development methodology, there’s something in common : the need of measuring source code quality. If I had to pick up only one tool for that that would be Sonar. Manning’s Sonar in Action is the only available book for Sonar that covers all seven axes of quality It explains core metrics, provides best practices for tuning, configuring and administering Sonar and includes a bonus chapter about writing your own plugin. 

 

2. Typesafe stack technologies
The Typesafe Stack is an integrated distribution that includes the Scala programming language, Akka event-driven middleware, and the Play web framework, along with a robust suite of development tools. It includes

• The Scala programming language and standard library
• The Akka event-driven middleware, with Scala and Java APIs
• The Play framework for developing real-time Web applications, with Scala and Java APIs

Manning is here again and offers a variety of books to quickly learn the above technologies

• Scala in Action
• Scala in Depth
• Functional Programming Scala
• Akka in Action
• Play for Scala

 

3. Android
Getting better and better after every new version, Android is the #1 choice for mobile application development. Manning’s books cover all levels of experience, so even if you’re a novice or an experienced professional you’ll surely find a book that’s for you!

• Android in Action
• Android in Practice
• Android UI in Action
• 50 Android Hacks

 

4. Big Data – NoSQL databases
RDBMS are dead. Long live NoSQL databases… Well RDBMS are not dead and will surely live for many years, but who can deny that NoSQL databases or a combination of these two technologies is the future of managing Big Data? Manning offers a series of books, that either target general concepts or focus on specific tools. 

• Big Data
• Hadoop in Action
• Hadoop in Practice
• HBase in Action
• Making Sense of NoSQL
• MongoBD in Action
• Redis in Action

So make up your mind and wait for Monday 17th or Christmas Day and Christmas Eve to buy your favorite books !!!

Manning offers 50% off any purchase – pBook eBook MEAP – Halloween Treat

Heads up.  Manning’s Deal of the Day is a special treat for Halloween. They are offering 50% off any purchase—eBook, pBook, or MEAP.

Get my book Sonar in Action or choose from hundreds of technical titles and get half off today only at manning.com. Use promo code dotd1031au to get the discount on your entire purchase.

The code dotd1031au is live starting midnight ET tonight and runs through midnight ET Oct 31.

Scoop.it

My top 5 Scala articles selection for week 15-21 October

In this post I present a selection (top 5) of Scala-related articles I read the previous week ( 15-21 October )

At the end of the month I’m gonna call a vote for the most useful post about Scala for October so keep reading FP guys and girls!

1. Benchmarking Scala against Java

The first article I suggest is a comparison of the quick sort algorithm implementations using Scala and Java. Interesting results and comments on the blog!
http://jazzy.id.au/default/2012/10/16/benchmarking_scala_against_java.html

 

2. XML Processing in Scala

Scala treats XML documents as first class citizens. This presentation illustrates how easy is to parse and process XML documents with Scala. Bye-bye JAXB!
http://blog.knoldus.com/2012/10/16/xml-processing-in-scala/

3. Does Scala as an FP language suffer from its OO syntax?

Well, this article tries to find the answer. What do you think? Does it suffer?
http://java.dzone.com/articles/does-scala-fp-language-suffer

4. Tools for test-driven development in Scala

Scala, ScalaTest, Specs2, ScalaMock, TDD, BDD : All these tools and practices blended together in a presentation. The result? Awesome!
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/10/scala-development-daniel-hinojosa.html

5. Convince your boss to let you use Scala

I love this powerpoint presentation.If you’re in the same position trying to convinces your boss(es) to let you learn and use Scala in a production software system then this is your chance!!

http://scala-boss.heroku.com/#14

Until next week have fun with functional programming 

My top 5 Scala articles selection for week 08-14 October

In this post I present a selection (top 5) of Scala-related articles I read the previous week ( 08-14 October )

Getting started with Play 2.1, Scala 2.10 and Slick 0.11.1

I suppose that most of you have already read many articles Play and/or Scala.  This post is really awesome as it gives you some basic instructions on how to install, configure and make use of Slick with Play 2.1 and Scala 2.10. You don’t know what Slick is? Well, what are you waiting for? Start reading!
http://java.dzone.com/articles/getting-started-play-21-scala

 

Modular programming using Object in Scala

Very interesting presentation about how Scala can help you write modules using Object and traits
http://blog.knoldus.com/2012/10/10/knolx-session-modular-programming-using-object-in-scala/

Getting started with Scala and Scalatra

This is the last part of a four-article series about using Scalatra, a tiny web framework for Scala. This article introduces Akka and demonstrates how you can your application in Jboss 7.1.0 using openshift
http://www.smartjava.org/content/tutorial-getting-started-scala-and-scalatra-part-iv

Towards better refactoring support in IDEs for functional programming

This article is not Scala oriented, the examples shown are, however written in Scala. It targets a topic that IMHO it’s going to be very really important for next release of popular IDEs.
http://java.dzone.com/articles/towards-better-refactoring

Coursera’s Functional Programming – Cheating discovered

If you’ve enrolled in coursera’s course about functional programming and Scala, then you have probably read an email about cheating discovered in assignments solutions. This discussion in ycombinator is awesome. Different opinions and thoughts that break the limits of the initial topic
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631362

Until next week have fun with functional programming