Build servers are for more than just building

Using a build server (such as CruiseControl doesn’t mean developers shouldn’t run local builds (even though broken builds aren’t really as serious as a lot of people make them out to be). So this raises the question: if developers run their build locally, what’s the build server for?
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Heavy or light: it’s all relative

On the XP mailing list a discussion has been going on recently on how a student at a presentation commented that XP seemed to be fairly heavy. Now, I know that “heavy” and “light” are rather passé terms for describing methodologies these days, but you know, the student was right – for a certain point of view. In the immortal words of Ben Kenobi, “many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.”
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There’s more to managing an economy than lowering taxest

Interesting article in the New York Times on how GW Bush is looking to reshape the American tax break.
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Never use a working template

A common feature of many IDE are templates, which greatly speed writing code. People often create their own “cut-and-paste” templates as well.

An important rule to remember here is that no template should ever “work” out of the box. This way, if (for whatever reason!) you don’t fill it in, you know it will fail fast. This helps avoid bugs that can be quite subtle: template code which fails slowly. 🙂
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Expressing Intent vs Duplication

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague this afternoon. It centred around what was more important: expressing intent (which I was advocating) vs. removing duplication.
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Warning systems aren’t enough

Danny Ayers writes about a global internet tsunami warning system He missed the point; the SE-Asian Tsunami was detected in minutes by research centers in Hawaii. But there was no way to get the message out.

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Does it really matter if the build is broken?

Andy Marks recently posted a dissection of various categories of build failures. In general, I agree that there are definitely different severities of build failures. The question is: is there a time when a build failure is not important?

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Automated Test Running

A neat little Eclipse plugin I’m playing with at the moment is the Continuous Testing Plugin for Eclipse The basic purpose of this plugin is to run your tests (or a selected subset) as part of the build cycle in Eclipse.
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Estimation Anti-Pattern

Name: Precision Estimation

AntiPattern Problem

Developers continually get asked to provide an estimate with a high degree of accuracy. They are expected to spend a fixed period of time to produce the estimate.

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