Lately I’ve been doing a lot of testing of the Ubuntu One desktop software and I need to be able to quickly get various versions of Ubuntu up and running. Below I outline how I do that on an Ubuntu host computer. My steps assume that you’re familiar with VirtualBox enough that you know how to setup a virtual machine (VM) already.

Create a master image

The master image is the one we’ll use to clone test images off of. By doing this we can worry about keeping our master image up-to-date and configured the way we need it and then simply clone that image when we have to test.

1. Create a new VM in VirtualBox and install the OS  (see Lifehacker’s guide if you’re not sure how to do this)
2. After restarting the VM when the install is done, install all the latest updates on the master image and restart
3. Install the VirtualBox Guest Additions (allows nice integration with the host computer)
4. Shutdown the master image

Periodically you’ll want to make sure your master image has all the latest updates, so just boot it up, install the updates and then shut it down.

Clone the master image

Now we’re ready to start testing some software. Instead of using the master image we created above, we’re going to clone that image. This should take less than 5 minutes start to finish.

1. In a terminal session do the following:

   cd ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks
   VBoxManage clonehd master_image.vdi test_image.vdi --format VDI

2. In VirtualBox, create a new VM by clicking the New button
3. Go through each screen selecting the appropriate values and clicking the Next button until you get to the Virtual Hard Disk part
4. Select the Use existing hard disk radio button
   
5. Click on the folder icon next to the pull down menu listing existing VDI files
6. Click the Add button
   
7. Select the image you created (should be in ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks) to add it to the list of available hard disks
8. Click on the image you just added and then click the Select button
9. Click the Next button
10. Click the Finish button

You now have a brand new VM to use for testing. Once you test with this image and decide its usefulness is over you can delete the virtual disk image (VDI) file in ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks, repeat step 1 above to create a new cloned image, and then edit your cloned VM in VirtualBox to use the new clone image. In other words, you don’t have to setup a new VM (steps 2-10) every time you want to use another VDI if you don’t want to.

Last week I was talking with one of the developers at work and he was telling me about improvements his team was making in regards to (informal/desk check) code reviews. I told him that was great and then followed that up with a recommendation on how to improve even more.  Next time there is a code review, start with the tests. This will do two things: 1) Stress the importance of having tests 2) Make the review go quicker, as the tests will either be there and make the intent of the code clear or they won’t be there and the review is postponed until tests are in place.

I know I’m not the first to make this suggestion, but I felt it was worth repeating. Code reviews do have value, even when you pair program. At least, I think they do. Pair programming provides two sets of eyes on the code at the time of creation, but it’s surprising what someone who hasn’t seen the code before will find during a review.

Oh, and if reviewing the tests during a code review doesn’t make the intent of the code any clearer, then I suggest the team investigate behavior driven development (BDD). I’m becoming quite partial to the Cucumber framework for BDD, as I like it’s emphasis on user stories with acceptance tests/examples written in plain text and backed by executable steps.

What I saw during the wait was kind of surprising. I noticed that the staff were diligently doing their jobs, quickly moving from one spot to another. I had to be careful not to step too far away from the waiting area or I was sure to bump into one of the busy bee workers. And while the staff was incredibly focused on the operations of the restaurant, I couldn’t help but notice they were almost oblivious to their customers, whether those customers be waiting for a table, eating their meal, or somewhere in between. I looked around the restaurant of about 40 tables and noticed that at any given moment there were numerous people looking to get the attention of their waitress. Customers coming in through the door were rarely greeted in a timely manner. Those of us waiting for a table were ignored completely, even as our original wait time came and went.

It dawned on me that this situation is not unlike what happens with some software development projects. We get in the groove of producing the software and never take time to make sure we’re satisfying the customer. Yes, those of us practicing agile have the advantage of delivering in short iterations which, at worst, won’t allow a project to go too long before the customer is back in the mix. But, even on agile projects, I’ve seen teams go through an entire iteration without giving much thought to the customer’s needs beyond the initial planning meeting. We think we understand exactly what the customer wants, can’t or simply don’t get continuous feedback from the customer during the iteration, and we develop the functionality. We become like the restaurant’s staff, who are so busy running the restaurant that they forget about the very people who really keep the restaurant running, the customers. Sure, the orders are taken, the food is getting out to people, drinks are refilled, new people are put on the waiting list, etc., but the customers aren’t satisfied, let alone happy. The software gets designed, written, documented, tested, etc. but the customers aren’t satisfied, let alone happy. Sound familiar?

Tonight was a good reminder that technical and operational excellence is critical to delivering a good customer experience, but if we lose sight of the customer in that process then we will fail miserably. We need to be diligent about keeping constant contact with the customer and focusing on the value we’re delivering. We don’t want our customers to walk away from us like my family and others did on the restaurant we attempted to eat dinner at tonight.

Anyone who talks to me about user stories knows I’m kind of a stickler on the value statement.  I think I’ve found a kindred soul in Aslak Hellesoy, the creator of Cucumber. The following comes from the Cucumber documentation.

You should discuss the “In order to” part of the feature and pop the why stack max 5 times (ask why recursively) until you end up with one of the following business values:

• Protect revenue
• Increase revenue
• Manage cost

If you’re about to implement a feature that doesn’t support one of those values, chances are you’re about to implement a non-valuable feature. Consider tossing it altogether or pushing it down in your backlog. Focus on implementing the MMFs (Minimum Marketable Features) that will yield the most value.

Here is an example taken from an IRC chat session in #cucumber:

[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: I'm having problems applying the "5 Why" rule, to the feature
                         "login" (imagine an application like youtube)
[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: how do you explain the business value of the feature "login"?
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: In order to be recognized among other people, I want to login
                         in the application (?)
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: why do I want to be recognized among other people?
[5:11pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why do people have to log in?
[5:12pm] Luis_Byclosure: I dunno... why?
[5:12pm] aslakhellesoy:  I'm asking you
[5:13pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why have you decided login is needed?
[5:13pm] Luis_Byclosure: identify users
[5:14pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why do you have to identify users?
[5:14pm] Luis_Byclosure: maybe because people like to know who is
                         publishing what
[5:15pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why would anyone want to know who's publishing what?
[5:17pm] Luis_Byclosure: because if people feel that that content belongs
                         to someone, then the content is trustworthy
[5:17pm] aslakhellesoy:  Why does content have to appear trustworthy?
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Trustworthy makes people interested in the content and
                         consequently in the website
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get people interested in the website?
[5:20pm] aslakhellesoy:  
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy:  Are you selling something there? Or is it just for fun?
[5:21pm] Luis_Byclosure: Because more traffic means more money in ads
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy:  There you go!
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get more money in ads? Because I want to increase
                         de revenues.
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: And this is the end, right?
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy:  In order to drive more people to the website and earn more admoney,
                         authors should have to login,
                         so that the content can be displayed with the author and appear
                         more trustworthy.
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy:  Does that make any sense?
[5:25pm] Luis_Byclosure: Yes, I think so
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  It's easier when you have someone clueless (like me) to ask the
                         stupid why questions
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  Now I know why you want login
[5:26pm] Luis_Byclosure: but it is difficult to find the reason for everything
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy:  And if I was the customer I am in better shape to prioritise this
                         feature among others
[5:29pm] Luis_Byclosure: true!

I was impressed to find that section in the documentation. Not only do the docs detail basic usage but they go into the deeper discussion of how to apply agile principles using Cucumber. The balancing act of teaching principles and practices at the same time is no small feat. To find that in software documentation is pretty amazing.

P.S. One of my worst titles ever, I know. I think I was subconsciously inspired by the Hallmark Movie my wife had on a couple nights ago. I now realize I missed my calling as a greeting card writer.

Now, onto the problem I was running into and the solution. Unless you want the long boring details, I can save you the trouble and tell you to make sure you have mod_rewrite enabled in Apache.

If you haven’t dozed off by now then it probably means you’re running into issues with the Shindig PHP setup and would like some more details. I followed the directions on setting up the PHP Shindig server on my laptop running Kubuntu 08.04 here at home and kept getting a 404 error. I thought that was strange since I could hit other files with my browser that I put in that directory manually for testing but not the Shindig index.php page. Turns out the Shindig index.php page tries to be more “controller/servlet” like by sniffing the URI and passing it along to the appropriate handler. If it can’t find a match, then it gives a custom 404 error. I noticed the test URI (http://shindig/gadgets/ifr?url=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml) didn’t have any reference to index.php. Ah yes, the wonders of Apache mod_rewrite! And guess what I didn’t have enabled? Yep, Apache mod_rewrite. So, below is what I did to get things running on an Ubuntu setup from scratch (meaning no Apache 2, PHP 5 was installed or configured):

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils ssl-cert libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-mcrypt

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/shindig/trunk/ /home/jhoover/dev/shindig

sudo mv /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load  /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/shindig

sudo pico /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/shindig

Stop laughing, I use the Pico text editor. I’m, as my son would say, “weak sauce”. I know. Anyway, here’s what I have in that virtual host file:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  ServerName shindig

  DocumentRoot /home/jhoover/dev/shindig/php
  DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
  <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
  LogLevel warn

  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
  ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

Once we have that in place, we need to edit our host file:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

Append the following to the hosts file and save:

127.0.0.1       shindig

Time to restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you should be able to go to your web browser of choice and run the demo/test app:

http://shindig/gadgets/ifr?url=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml

If all went well you should see something a little like this:

Otherwise, what’s the point? Pile up one xml on top of the other? 

I couldn’t resist.  A cheap shot at Java.  I’m just bitter after being exposed to one too many Java frameworks in the past that seemed to think that “you can never have too much XML” was a mantra to proudly live by.

Internships
If you’re interested in an internship with Gestalt’s Joplin office, please send your resume to my email address: jhoover at gestalt-llc.com. I’ll make sure your resume gets to the right people within Gestalt.

Agile Software Engineering
Some of the agile software engineering best practices I mentioned during the presentation were Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI). Since MSSU is focused on .NET, here are some links that might be helpful related to TDD and CI:

• NUnit – .NET unit testing framework
• CruiseControl.NET – .NET continuous integration server
• CruiseControl.NET with Visual Studio 2005 project tutorial

YouTube Videos
Coco had asked how Gestalt was using YouTube. I mentioned that we used it as part of a recruiting effort. We had a contest open to the employees to see who could make the coolest recruiting video on YouTube. The results of that contest can be found here. The winner (as voted on by Gestalt employees) was John Moffet’s PatrolNet Woes. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’m embedding my video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recommended Read
A book I’m in the process of reading that I think would be extremely beneficial for college students to read is My Job Went To India. I’m about a third of the way through and the advice is practical and especially relevant for those entering the IT workforce these days.

RSS
There were some questions about RSS during the presentation. May I suggest checking out the Gestalt Blogs RSS feed? This feed has all the posts from Gestalt bloggers, with quite a few being out of the Joplin office. My personal favorite combo for subscribing to and reading RSS feeds is Firefox and Google Reader.

Open Source
Below are the links to all our current Open Source projects:

• JBI Binding Components
  • RSS BC
  • SIP BC
  • UDDI BC
  • XMPP BC
• Other Gestalt Open Source Projects
  • Encoding Service Engine
  • JBI Mock Framework
  • Openfire Packet Listener

Remember to look into joining an Open Source project. While I don’t have any specific recommendations on projects to join (other than our own!), I can definitely recommend reading the book Producing Open Source Software. You can get a free PDF and HTML version of the book.

I started to read a bit more about decentralized VCS; knowing that Linus Torvalds is a HUGE proponent of it I figured I’d see what he had to say. I found this crazy long email reply Linus gives about a month ago to Adam Treat of the KDE dev team, who asked Linus some questions about moving from Subversion to git. It makes my brain hurt trying to think about version control in the way Linus does. I’m not even going to try to summarize his thoughts here because I’m still processing them. I hope to come back and elaborate some more if I get the time to check out Bazaar and further investigate if distributed VCS is something that makes sense for a company like Gestalt to consider using.

P.S. Knowing version control systems, the important functions they serve and how to properly use them in configuration management is key to being an ideal QCer on an agile team in my (rarely) humble opinion.

I’m going to leave a comment on Alex’s site pointing him to this post. I’m putting the code here for download if anyone wants it. I’m also leaving a patch file here for Alex in case he’s interested in using it. I’m not sure it’s worth it or not – not my call. I’m just happy I can spam…errr…inform those at Gestalt using Twitter when I have a new post on this blog. Sure, they can do that even better using RSS, but that’s not as cool as saying you got it off Twitter. Heh.

• Twitter Tools plugin (zipped file with my additions)
• Twitter Tools CURL patch

This is not an issue in Alex’s code, as he points out in a recent blog post. This is an issue with Twitter’s infrastructure, which users are noticing more as the service has grown. Scaling web apps/services is hard. I’ll have a post on that in the not so distant future.