I just finished submitting the first draft of my Agile 2009 presentation proposal: Continuous Testing Evolved. A lot has changed since I presented on the same topic last year, and I felt there was a lot of value in exploring some of those changes. It's also still a very new practice, and there's a lot of people who are unfamiliar with it and would benefit from this talk.

If you've worked on projects of any reasonable size, you know that managing dependencies is an very important part of software maintenance. However, the terms used to describe coupling between packages, efferent and afferent coupling, sound so much alike that I can never remember which one is which. So, I don't use those names...I have my own naming convention.

Yakov Smirnoff was well known in the 1980's for jokes using the following template:

In America, you [verb] [noun]
In Soviet Russia, [noun] [verb] you!

Hilarious.

I use this now popularized meme to differentiate between the two basic types of coupling, like so:

In America, you depend on other classes
In Soviet Russia, other classes depend on you!

So American Coupling equates to efferent coupling, while Soviet Coupling is the same as afferent coupling. When using these cold-war era terms to analyze a particular class or package, I never get confused about which sort of coupling is which. I just think of Yakov and all becomes clear.

So, I built an alarm to notify our team of build failures.

Here's a shot of the internals:

Overhead view

It has an audible alarm and strobe light, is controlled via USB and runs off 12v power. The control software uses the RSS feed from our build server to watch for failures, and sets off the alarm accordingly.

This was a really fun project, and I'm still hunting around for cool electronics to hook up to it (I still have 2 open relays!)

If you're using the @Ignore annotation to disable failing JUnit 4 tests, you might consider using a different technique. By adding the expects=AssertionError.class parameter to the @Test annotation, you can actually assert that the test fails as expected, instead of just ignoring it.