Last week I had the pleasure attended Heinz Kabutz Java Specialists Master course to sharpen my Java skills. Java Champion Heinz, is a great trainer who manages to combine anecdotes, hard facts and deep Java knowledge with engaging exercises to a well done course. The scope was the whole spectrum of Java, but focusing on the details you normally do not use, or know how to use. Some of the material he already published as part of his newsletters, which are read all around the world.

Let me share my impressions on the course with you in this day by day review… (read more…)

Software projects that are developed based on agile processes like Scrum or eXtreme Programming are very demanding concerning the skills of the developers in an agile team.

In 2001 Andrew Hunt and David Thomas introduced a benchmark for modern developers with their book  „The Pragmatic Programmer“. The focus of their work is on practises, tools and design-paradigms to help programmers produce better code. (read more…)

Only available in German.

The Robot Framework is a very versatile tool and never confronted us with unsolvable problems so far. In some regards it still feels a little rough and needs some polishing, to make development and maintenance of automated tests more efficient. One of those areas is the integration into the well known development environment. There is the Robot IDE, but this only covers a fraction of my requirements. The following will show, how easily the Robot Framework and your own Java Keywords can be integrated in Maven and Eclipse.
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“Dr. codecentric und seine kranken Pfleger”, (codecentric, M.D. and his sick attendants) the codecentric board game team, Andreas Ebbert-Karroum, Torsten Rodemann, Marc Clemens and Fabian Lange (left to right) competed in Dinslakenhighly motivated for the qualification for the national board game championship this Saturday. After having been quite successful last year at our first attempt, our expectations were high, despite the lack of proper training.

Every player had to play one round of each of the games: Agricola, a pretty complex strategy game, Stoneage, a round based resource gathering game, Dominion, an interesting card game, in which players compile a custom card deck according to the available cards and their strategy, and Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck, a pretty simple dice-rolling game, which trains you calculating probabilities.
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We are using the Robot Framework for quite some time now for our automated acceptance tests with very good results. Personally I am using the Robot Framework already for a bit longer time and I find its fundametal concepts really extremely convincing. The generic test libraries (for example related to testing Selenium or SSH) that are freely available are another strength of the tool. But up to now a generic keyword library for testing databases was missing. I think I have written such a library already three times for two different companies, because at the end of the day almost every application is using a database. This means that automated tests should – at least random – check if data is properly written to the database. This way an application can be really tested end-to-end .
(read more…)