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Story Driven Development with Cucumber, RightScale and Punk Rock HR

Darin included in Development Processes Personal
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This past week, Sean Cribbs presented “Story-Driven Development with Cucumber” at the Charlotte Ruby User Group. I’m still trying to get the hang of Ruby, but I have to admit, there are a lot of cool tools around the Ruby community, and Cucumber is no different.

Here are a couple of items that I gleaned from the talk:

  • miscommunication == waste
  • focus of SDD is stay lean and create value
  • if you haven’t reached the answer in 5 whys, there’s no value in the process

I’m looking forward to spending some time with Cucumber. I think it will help with some upcoming projects.

One of the tools that Sean talked about is called Lowdown, an online app to create, edit and discuss feature stories. Based on a demo that he gave of Lowdown, I’m looking forward to trying it out to write some of the stories.

One of the other apps I’ve been reviewing is Plone. I’m trying to find an open source content management system to replace an existing system for a client. However, there are a couple of requirements:

  • you must be able to bundle together assets and publish them in a bucket, not just a one-by-one edit and deploy
  • there needs to be a workflow to publish from a development environment to a QA environment to a staging environment to finally a production environment

I had looked at Lenya, but it doesn’t appear to cover these 2 requirements. So far, I think I can make Plone work, but I can tell it’s going to take some work to get the workflow setup the way that I need it. There is an extension call EnSimpleStaging, but it’s still not exactly what I need. I hope to spend some more time with it this week. If anyone has any suggestions on how to implement my requirements with Plone or with any other CMS, please contact me.

Finally on the tech side, I signed up with a developer (free) edition with RightScale. I haven’t had time to really start working with it yet, but that’s on the list for this week. I’ve got a couple of projects that I want to try out, so I think RightScale is going to help me build out a couple of cloud options with both Amazon and Rackspace. That’s where it appears that RightScale really makes it easy to mitigate your risk with just one cloud provider. Yeah, I know. I need to feel the pain of setting up some EC2 instances by hand. However, I’ve got too many other things going on, so RightScale is going to be my shortcut for now.

Here are a handful of tweets that I rung my bell recently:

As a followup from my rant last week, I invite you to visit the Punk Rock Employee Handbook. WARNING. . .some of my readers may be offended. . .but don’t start me ranting again 🙂

Updated on 2010-01-11
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