Scrum Baseball

When talking about Scrum, the question often comes up about "customization." Each team is expected to customize things to their environment. But when you're adopting it for the first time, how far is too far? I've heard other analogies surrounding baseball, here's mine:

What is baseball? Softball is still pretty much baseball. T-ball is still pretty much baseball. What about Cricket? While it has bats and balls and running around, it isn't baseball.

My "short list" for scrum is:

Work is stack ranked in a product backlog, sized relatively
Work may begin before product backlog is "complete"
Work done in iterations
Daily standups for status

Code Coverage for Eclipse redeux: EclEmma

In a previous entry, I lamented that I couldn't get instant feedback for the coverage results of my unit tests in eclipse. A coworker (David Koontz of SolutionsIQ) pointed me at EclEmma. In a nutshell, it works.

It gives me line-by-line coverage, highlighted in green, yellow, and red like the coverage reports I get from Cobertura. In addition to file-by-file coverage, EclEmma also summarizes coverage reports for an entire project in an Eclipse view much like the Cobertura's roll-up behavior.

It plugs into Eclipse smoothly via update site, and works with all my tests including configuration details with Spring, Hibernate, HSQL, etc. Usage was simple: if I had a JUnit execution defined in Eclipse (generated automatically via runAs .. unit test), then I can reuse it with EclEmma. Run As ... Coverage Test is also available.

My only complaint is some strange behavior around code that throws exceptions. If a block of code throws an exception partway through, EclEmma counts that entire block as untested. The authors point to this being a limitation of the Emma code coverage tool. My code doesn't generally throw a lot of expected exceptions, so it hasn't been a major issue.


In general, happy as a clam am I!