The second half of the meeting was an open discussion that revolved around practices of Agile teams. There's also an entertaining rant by I'm-still-Brad in the middle.
This video was captured at the Chicago ALT.NET August 13th meeting. This first video is the Cruise presentation.
This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available somehow.
As previously mentioned we started off with a presentation of ThoughtWorks Cruise, where Robert Norton explained the idea of CI server, Agents, Pipelines and went through many of Cruise features, system requirements, and futures. He also clarified his company's position regarding CruiseControl.net, which will most likely not receive a lot of attention in terms of funding, being left for the community to keep it going.
Cruise seemed promising to me but it's clearly a typical version 1 product that needs some work to get enthusiastic thumbs up from me. Hopefully they move quickly and release a few updates before the year is over to make the product top notch. I don't mean to say Cruise in unusable. It's definitely usable and does things in a very smart way. Given time I'm sure they will take care of the rough edges and have a chance to answer customer feedback. My particular concerns tend to be on the side of ability to integrate with other systems in the enterprise, like your bug/feature tracker.
After the presentation portion we all sat together for an open discussion. The fallback topic was CI practices but what the group really wanted to talk about was Agile teams and their dynamics, so that's what the discussion became. As usual, that's my favorite part of the meeting and it's a pity that only 50% of the attendance stuck around for it.
It's nice when you go to a meeting like this and can take home a lot of new knowledge.
We are adding a new contributor to Devlicio.us. Join me and welcome Tim Barcz and his blog posts to our site.
Tim will be another Midwest blogger, reporting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is the president of the CRIneta and always involved with the local and global .NET community.
I've met Tim at the ALT.NET Conference in Seattle earlier this year, where we had a chance to chat quite a bit. I've always liked the positive attitude of his blog and we share the same goal of finding and provoking passion for software development.
Tim is moving his previous blog over here and not a minute too soon. Welcome aboard, Tim.
As you may have heard, ThoughtWorks, home of CruiseControl.net, has just released Cruise, their commercial product for CI and beyond.
As soon as we heard that news we immediately thought: It would be great if we had someone from TW give us the scoop on that product — especially considering that they already host our meetings. ThoughtWorks was completely on board with that idea and immediately offered to have someone fromt he Cruise team talk to us.
I think we will have a very good presentation and debate. If you are in the area, come join us.
6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time
6:30 pm
Come see Robert Norton, tech lead of ThoughtWorks
Cruise CI/Release
Management product, talk about Cruise and how it helps managing software
builds and deployments. ThoughtWorks is the force behind the Open Source
CruiseControl.net and this new product is their
commercial offering in this segment.
7:45 pm
After the Cruise presentation, let’s delve into more
discussions about CI and configuration management. Bring your
questions and experiences.
