“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 .
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Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch .

I will be attending the course by Dr. Heinz Kabutz next week from 2nd-5th of March in Düsseldorf.

I have pretty high expectations, as I already read his newsletter since quite some time and also my impressions of Heinz, when he gave his talk at our meet the experts, were very positive. He really knows all the nasty details about Java, and I hope I can get some of those out of his and into my brain. The course promises “Extreme Java”. I am looking forward to very esotheric subtleties without any practical value. And of course to many caveates that you indeed would find in everyday work.

I am also looking forward to meeting other Java geeks to exchange knowledge and have a good week. Will you be there?

(note that the course is in German)

Meanwhile, there is a debate for a long time whether architecture and design are the same thing or not. The advocates of the “both are the same” thesis say that architecture is basically the first stage of design, while the opponents of this thesis claim that architecture and design are completely different tasks that just share some more or less fuzzy line of contact. So, who the heck is right? read more…

Englisch version coming soon …