The JavaEE Xperience

What the title says.

The blog appears to be under some kind of redirection attack. Still attempting to fix.

I have been trying to find ways to enable single sign-on between WebCenter Spaces and custom portals. Without using OAM or OID.

I tried using SAML to simulate SSO. This hit a road-block because I couldn’t find a way to make ADFAuthentication work with SAML. The only configuration that allowed auto-login to work left the user with a blank screen (as it involved using /adfAuthentication as the destination target).

The only other way forward is to use a 3rd party SSO platform (JOSSO) for e.g. and see if WebCenter can be configured to work with it. I don’t have very high hopes for this. Oracle’s documentation limits itself to OID/OAM as the SSO provider and does not even mention the possibility of using a 3rd party SSO solution.

Have you had any successes (or failures) in this area? I would love to hear of how your attempts went.

John blogs here on a cool way to add CSS menus to a WCS site template.

Interesting how he has dropped a DIV directly into the template. Without being constrained by the ADF provided layouts, a UI designer should be able to develop some very cool templates for sites.

So, I’m considering building a NAS+DLNA Server. It just seems to make better sense than buying a pre-built NAS box. Anyway, I don’t know when I will actually begin work on it.

In the meantime though, I wanted to install ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron and test DLNA and also play right out to HDMI from ubuntu. I haven’t done any Linux installs for a few years now. Ubuntu is such a breeze to install. I remember the tideousness of Linux installs in years of yore. Read the rest of this entry »

I am reading up on Ruby and getting intimate with its conciseness. My initial thoughts are on the lines of – “Alright, it’s easy for the developer – lesser lines of code, no declaration necessary, no type checking necessary, etc, etc – but imagine the pains of the maintainer.” Read the rest of this entry »

After quite a long time, I get to write some plain old j2ee code. No ORM, no controller framework, no component framework. Just good friend JSP with DTOs and DAOs. Persistence is through JDBC. I don’t even need an IDE. Ha, the simple life.

My organization is moving onto experiment with Lean development.  Lean comes from the manufacturing sector but fits surprisingly well into software development. After all, Lean is not specific process but a set of principles. Some of the main principles of Lean include removing waste, delaying decisions, delivering faster, building in integrity – all of them aiming to get products/services out to the customer speedily. What’s more! Agile practices like Scrum help achieve some of these principles. For e.g. the backlog in Scrum enables delaying decisions like what will go into the final version of the product, etc. Read this excellent article that maps Scrum practices to the Lean principles and how a team can use Scrum to go lean!

Sustaining and Kanban

While Scrum works very well for teams involved in a typical development cycle, it is not flexible enough to adapt to a maintenance oriented team. We have a dedicated team that works on product bugs reported by customers. They reproduce, fix and release fixes regularly. Any maintenance/support team has to work within the complexities of changing issue severity, customer impact and unpredictable resolution times. As a result, the concept of product (or in this case issue) backlog and sprints cannot be used in a maintenance/support team.

This is where Kanban comes into the picture. Kanban can be applied to a waterfall model as seen in sustaining teams. Read David Anderson’s paper – A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering.

In our sustaining team, the main focus is on three kanban concepts – Limiting WIP, Self Directing and Pull Production. How do they help?

Limiting WIP

At any given time, the sustaining team maintains about 3 or 4 versions of a product and about 10 different components within a version. Pre-Kanban, every resource on the team worked on a large number of issues simultaneously. The context switching was a huge overhead as every switch potentially required starting up a particular version of the product, installing reproducible cases and sometimes switching between product components. Now, with the limited WIP, the team is limited as a whole to have X issues in progress and as a result every individual is limited to a much lesser load. This not only saves context switch times but also allows the individual to focus on one (or two) issue at a time and push them out of the queue.

Self Directing

The Kanban master merely prioritizes the issues in the To Do column of the Kanban board. Except for production-impact issues, all other issues are self assigned by the individuals. This ensures that the individual picks up tasks in accordance to available capacity and thus don’t get overloaded. In addition, it allows individuals the opportunity to pick up issues in areas that they would like to work on – translating into motivation and pride.

Pull Production

The issues are never pushed from the upstream states. They are always pulled by the downstream states. This means that if there is a bottleneck (a downstream state being full), the team will know and they can work together on the bottleneck and get it out to the next state.

We started out with a physical kanban board using coloured Post-It Notes. The colour of the note signified the severity/priority of issues. The board was the talk of the office and drew a lot of interest from other teams. Our throughput was sometimes too high and meant regularly going up to the board to shift the notes. And the post-its kept falling off the board :-)

We have since switched to an online version hosted by www.kanbantool.com. It’s accessible and available 24/7 whether we are in office or working from home. It’s not as much fun as the physical board but it works very well.

We have been using Kanban for about 2 months now. The board has changed quite a bit from its original state – one of the good things about kanban is that it is meant to be continuously improving/changing. We are in a fairly static state now but we do expect to optimise the board further.

In the 2 months, we have managed to cut down our issue backlog by about 15% inspite of seeing 2 weeks which showed a steep rise in new bug reports. Kanban sure has worked wonders for our team and we are hoping to keep it that way.

Update (11th July): The team went on to break a record of sorts. After compensating for the inflow, our backlog is now down by almost 50% now. Kanban does work.

The much awaited 8.0 release of the webMethods platform was announced at the Gartner summit. Read more here.

We are back online after a malware injection, wordpress upgrade and a domain renewal. The wordpress upgrade brought me to 2.7.1 what-seems-like-minutes-before 2.8 came out. Ah! Such is life.