Nice phrase to descibe the way a team thinks for themselves (they take command). This is the opposite of some teams where the management what to control everything they do.
I stumbled across this the other day. Bill Strickland is amazing. All organisations need a Bill Strickland… I recommend you give it a look.
http://stream.fuqua.duke.edu/Content/fuqua_events/2003/Strickland/Strickland.smil
You can find more about Bill at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/17/genius.html
I particularly like this observation:
“Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they’re just not called that,” Strickland says. “They have the ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That’s what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways. The hip companies know that.”
I have always been frustrated at how slow ant is at running my tests. If I run my tests in Intellij it takes around 4 minutes to run 1300 tests. The same tests in ant take over 12 minutes.
This is not such a big deal when I’m developing as I run them all in Intellij. The problem is that the Continuous Integration server runs ant. If the automatic build takes too long following a commit, I will have started working on something else.
I was telling people this as a recent Agile Summer School that Duncan Pierce and I ran. Justin Forder did some digging around and found the magic forkmode attribute…
You normally fork a new JVM to run the tests since it isolates your tests from Ant’s environment (which places a lot of libraries on the classloader). The reason it’s slow is that the default behavior is to fork a new JVM for each test case class. That’s a lot of forking.
It turns out that Ant 1.6.2 introduced a new junit task attribute called “forkmode“. If you set it to “once“, Ant will fork a single Java VM for all your tests classes.
Fantastic, the build server is now running all the tests in 6 minutes (it’s not as fast as my development machine).
Thanks to Justin Forder for pointing this out to me. See Stefan Bodewig’s Weblog for more info
