But, perhaps surprisingly, many teams have as much trouble getting the automated system up and running as they do in writing the tests in the first place. The problem is their build. They have a system that is sufficient for assembling their software but that isn't ready for the demands of an agile team, demands like continuous integration, unit tests, functional testing, software metrics, etc.

If you have this problem then you should take a look at the Build Engineer Bootcamp that we have scheduled for Minneapolis in April to coordinate with CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. These two events should pair very nicely: attend the bootcamp to learn the basics, then attend CITCON to delve into the state of the art.

Hope to see you there!

Along with a number of bug fixes and enhancements (release notes) there have been a number of significant below the surface changes that should be invisible out of the box but will be a GoodThing:

• Java 5 required to run: this allows us to update the code to more modern Java and to take advantage of the libraries that are part of Java 5 but not Java 1.5. (Of course you can still compile your projects with JDK 1.4.)
• Upgraded Jetty: along with the upgrade we are also exposing the Jetty configuration files to allow more extensions to the default behavior.
• Updated to Servlet API 2.5 and JSP API 2.1
• Specify Log4j config file: there is now a command-line switch (-log4jconfig) to specify the Log4j configuration file. Importantly, this can be either in the .properties format or the .xml format. The .xml format is more verbose (no surprise) but also allows more configuration options. From the Log4j tutorial:

"The properties file does not support some advanced configuration options like Filters, custom ErrorHandlers and a special type of appenders, i.e. AsyncAppender. ErrorHandlers defines how errors in log4j itself are handled, for example badly configured appenders. Filters are more interesting. From the available filters, I think that the level range filter is really missing for property files."

In addition to these change there quite a few little hygiene cleanups that made me happy.

"… there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life."

Read more.

Lots of bug fixes, lots of changes to the Dashboard.

New plugins:

• Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks Store Source Control
• Git Source Control & Bootstrapper
• Http Publisher
• Mercurial Source Control & Bootstrapper
• SVNLabelIncrementer

See detailed release notes here.

For those who haven't heard about it CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing CONference, an open spaces (or "unconference") event that attracts an energetic and enthusiastic crowd of CIT practitioners from around the US, Europe and Asia. If you've never been to an open spaces event you can think of it as the best part of a normal conference -- the hallway conversation -- dialed up to 11!

You can read about past CITCONs on the wiki and then register today. But hurry, there are already 120 people registered and only 30 more registrations will be accepted!

If you can't make it to Denver then you might want to plan ahead by registering now for CITCON Melbourne in June or CITCON Amsterdam in October. Or maybe even all three!

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that. I've even said it myself a few times.

It seemed like it would be pretty easy to do using the dashboard.xml feature of AgitarOne, so I decided to give it a try.