Engineering Blog

Background
I’ve never liked having to solve a problem in a different way for different browsers. Yes, I’m talking about you Internet Explorer. We’ve dropped support for IE6 at Rally (it still has to work, but is far from pixel perfect), but we still have many customers using IE7+.
Before version 4, ExtJS catered to the lowest [...]

One of the most common sources of tension between product owners and developers is when product owners are surprised at how high an estimate for a story might be. Usually this tension is easy to resolve by reiterating that the product owners really have no concept of how much something should cost. However, [...]

We moved in yesterday (2/7/2011). Unpacking went surprisingly well.
The whole engineering space has an overhead power and network grid that allows to easily configure team spaces. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be getting “T” shaped mobile walls to separate the area. Here are some pics of our new space on 3333 Walnut.

We recently started using Git as our version control system at Rally. Switching to Git has been a learning experience for many of us. I would like to share our experiences using Git in a team environment.
Working on a user story.
It’s Monday morning of a new iteration, we need [...]

Many developers think of unit tests as tests that test a single class. In fact, I myself once thought this way. If I wanted to write unit tests for a two-class system in which a class used another class, I’d write two unit tests. After all, if I created instances of both [...]

During the month and a half leading up to the holiday break, a group of five developers (including myself) volunteered to form a temporary Scrum.  The goal of this Scrum was to build Rally’s next generation of load-testing tool.  The need for a better tool surfaced when our current tool failed to forewarn us of [...]

The Rally software code base changes rapidly. The development team is continuously making enhancements and building new features for weekly releases to our production systems. In part, the ability and confidence to push code with a high frequency comes from our comprehensive collection of automated tests. The test suites include front/back-end unit tests, integration tests [...]

Mark Levison recently posted a challenge to Agile tool vendors, so I’ve written some responses below about our Definition of Done, TDD, acceptance testing, release frequency, and retrospectives.

My recent post on postmortem analysis discussed the investigative trail you can follow when your web app slows down and crashes. In the latter section I focused in on thread dump analysis. In this post I’ll continue the theme by switching to heap dump analysis and all the fun you can have with a large [...]

Here at Rally, we’ve climbed onto the Movember bandwagon. What’s Movember? Here’s the description from movember.com:
During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer [...]