NetBeans Day 2007

For the fifth time, the NetBeans Software Day was held as a soft start to JavaOne. In the opening keynote, Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green got a question about how they wanted to address the competition from Eclipse. They answered that without Eclipse, NetBeans would not be were it is today, and vice versa. Competition is good and no developer would ever say “I only need one tool….”.

I also attended a presentation of Swing Application Framework, Beans Binding and some other cool stuff upcoming in NetBeans 6.0. If you have not tried out NetBeans yet…try it out!

JavaOne 2007

Back in San Francisco! This year is my eight time at the conference, so it is starting to look like a tradition to me. An addition this year is that the airline company missed to bring my luggage, but it will hopefully come during the day…or so they say…

I am kind of jetlagged now, but I hope I will not promise to much by saying that I hope to be able to post something at least once a day during the conference.

The Second Sprint

Our second sprint started this week with a sprint planning meeting. We are suffering a bit from lack of involvement from the PO, but apart from that the feeling is that this planning meeting went smoother than the first. The team is getting more familiar with Scrum.

We even introduced story cards to facilitate the process. These were nice to have, but not as appreciated by the team as I had thought they would be. We will have to have a look at what information to present on these cards to make them the tool they are supposed to be…

After all, the nice thing with an agile approach is the flexibility so everything does not have to be perfect the first time 🙂

Retrospective

We had a retrospective after the first sprint yesterday.
The team was satisfied with the flexibility Scrum gives them. They really enjoyed the freedom with responsibility way of thinking. Rather than sit and wait for decisions to be made, they were able to make them themselves and proceed with their work.

As for areas of improvement, we identified that we have to focus more on the test part in the next sprint. We also had some minor problems with test data during the demo, so this has to be prepared more carefully. To address these issues, we have included fields for “How to Test” and “How to Demo” on our story cards. In that way we will be reminded to think of this every time we look at the cards…

The First Sprint

We are in the middle of the first sprint in my project since Scrum was introduced as development method. This is my first experience acting as ScrumMaster and I will try to share some of my thoughts as we go.

Just as everybody else that are using Scrum, we are using a slightly modified version. But that is, as I see it, one of the great advantages of agile methods.
Main differences from mainstream Scrum are:
– Sprint length is set to three week iterations rather than 30 days
– “Done” is defined as ready for system test rather than production ready
– Sprint planning was done over a couple of days rather than in a one day sprint meeting. The actual sprint planning meeting was kept short (1 hour)

Apart from this, we are doing it mostly by the book.

JUnitFactory

Agitar has launched a plug-in to Eclipse for test generation. The way it works is that your code is sent to their server where tests are generated and returned to you. The tests are generated by the same technology that is used in AgitarOne. Since it is experimental, it can even contain features that are not available in the commercial Agitar products yet.

I have just tested JUnit Factory on simple classes but it seems excellent! The test code looks fine, all your tests are listed with status information. You even get a coverage report and coverage markers in your code.

The only catch I have found so far is that you have to be online to be able to generate new tests. I found that out when I tried to test the plug-in while I was working offline on the train yesterday…

More information and request for download can be found on http://www.junitfactory.com/

JavaForum

The program for the next JavaForum Meeting in Malmö has been published on JavaForum (swedish). It seems to be a nice mix of presentations so everybody should be able to find something interesting there. At least the peanuts and beer afterwords should apply to most people 🙂

AgileÖresund

I just got a tip from a collegue that there is a small Agile community in Malmö. They meet every second Wednesday of the month to discuss and share agile experiences over a beer at Bishop’s Arms in Malmö. Take a look at the wiki! I have already marked my calendar with the date of next meeting….

AgitarOne

Writing tests for existing code is time consuming and boring for the developers and thus often neglected. Agitar recently launched a new tool called AgitarOne. This tool generates JUnit tests for your existing legacy application to make sure you do not break anything when you start adding functionality or refactoring the code base. Hopefully it will not be priced to high…

More information about AgitarOne can be found here.

Doctor Scrum

In this article (swedish), you can read about how they want to introduce Scrum-thinking in a hospital in Lund. By using experiences from Toyota’s “Lean Production”, they think they can do work that today takes over a month in only three hours! This is cool!