Tools

Jazz

I just had a look at the Jazz project and downloaded the latest version. I guess I am pretty slow since the Jazz Team Concert 1.0 Beta 2a was available a couple of weeks ago, but better late then never 🙂

The installation was easy. Instructions for server and client was comprehensive and pretty much straightforward so I had my test project up and running in less than half an hour.

Jazz is IBM Rational’s next-generation technology platform for collaborative software delivery. It is a collaboration platform for the full software lifecycle and absolutely worth take a closer look at.

Code Quality

What is code quality? According to the guys behind Crap4j it is the kind of code that makes you cry: This is crap! I think this is a pretty good definition. I have just read Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck. The main theme of this book is that the most important thing when writing good quality code is that it communicates well since code is read much more often than it is written…. and that the total cost of a piece of software is the sum of the initial cost of developing it and the cost of maintaining it. It often turns out that the maintenance cost is much higher than the initial cost. Hence good quality code is code that is easy to read and easy to maintain (i.e. add, remove and change functionality).

This is only one small aspect, so more will come…. I promise!

Øredev 2007 – Day 2

Well, I did not win the iPod… But I ended up 5th at the coding challege at the Epsilon booth. Not too bad if you consider the amount of programming expertise present at the conference. The second day of the conference started with an excellent keynote by Joel Spolsky. He talked about what it is that makes some products blue-chip products while other that just as good end up being ordinaray products.

I also heard Andy Hunt talking about how to refactor your wetware, Kevlin Henney talked about the Agility Cube and Jeff Sutherland
presented Project Management with Scrum. The conference ended with a panel debate about the complexity we are facing in modern software development. All in all a great day at the conference.

Øredev 2007 – Day 1

I blogged a short comment every day during JavaOne this summer. These days I am attending the Øredev 2007 Conference and I can not be any less ambitious now, so here we go 🙂

Day 1 opened with a keynote by Andy Hunt that was talking about “How hard can it be?“. It turns out that the answer to this question is that “it is as hard as we make it“.

In one session Rickard Öberg gave a crash course in Qi4j and Context Driven Design. Floyd Marinescu talked about trends and future of enterprise Java™. We got a presentation of JavaFX by Torbjörn Frizon where he coded the presentation viewer on the fly…  Rob Harrop gave an introduction to Spring Batch and Jeff Sutherland talked about The Agile Enterprise.

The afternoon keynote was held by Dan North where he talked about Best Practices or Better “Best” Practices or No Best Practices at all.  He kept his promise to let us out to get our well deserved beer on time 🙂

All in all a great day on the conference that ended with dinner, stand-up comedy and a couple of beers. Tomorrow I plan on winning an iPod in the exhibition hall…!!

ScrumWorks works

I have been playing around with ScrumWorks™ Basic Edition which is a free project management tool for Scrum and other agile methods.

ScrumWorks™ Basic features are:

  • Product backlog and release management
  • Categorization of backlog items using themes
  • Sprint task tracking for teams
  • Reports
  • Impediment tracking
  • User and team manager
  • Excel import/export
  • Web Services API
  • Automated and manual database backups

It was easy to install. Just download the file, unzip it and run the installer. Online help is good and it is pretty easy to understand if you know the basic terminology of Scrum.

More information and downloads can be found on the Danube Technolgies website.

Javaforum in Malmö September 27

Next Javaforum meeting in Malmö will be held September 27. At this meeting, I will give a presentation called Simply Java. I will not reveal more of the content at this moment, but I hope it will be worth while…

There will also be presentations on Netbeans and mobility, news in Spring 2.1
and an introduction to JavaFX.

See invitation for more information.

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.