Maven 3 talk in Cologne, by Jason van Zyl

I'm very proud that Jason van Zyl, founder and driver of Maven, will give a talk about Maven 3 in Cologne for the Java User Group, on November, 16th. I'm also very proud that I managed to catch another international high-end speaker for a presentation, for coming to Germany. Again, other groups profit from my preparatory work, and invited him too, now, for making a small side trip there. I will never understand, why there are few to zero cooperations between Java user groups, and where the benefit is to provide exactly the same talk in a distance of few days a bunch of miles away. Details about the talk here: http://jugcologne.eu.

Hudson@tutego

I'm proud to announce that I'm now in cooperation with tutego giving Hudson seminars.

Remaining conference performances 2009

The remaining months of 2009 I will have a different activities focus than conference performances. Nevertheless, there are a few talks I will give and events you can see me 2009:

- Agile 2009, August 24-28, as being the responsible stage producer for the Tools for Agility track.
- Java User Group Munich, October, 12th, "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and FEST"
- Devoxx, November, 19th, Methodology talk, details will follow ..

This list is limited to conferences where I will appear. It does not include Java User Group Cologne events I organize myself, seminars/workshops and similar.

Völliger Stillstand in Unternehmen

Jens Coldewey pointed me to this video of Peter Kruse, Honorarprofessor Organisationspsychologie. Peter set up eight rules to achieve the complete deadline in companies. 3 minutes 37 seconds which I really like. Thanks Jens. (the video is in German)

What a wonderful location ..

Agile @ Microsoft, or: did Microsoft manage the turnaround?

Do you want to know how to deliver software in a big (what I mean is really big) project in-time and aligned at customers' needs? Please have a look at the very interesting article about the development of Windows 7.

Some of my highlights out of this article (in German, sorry):

"Microsoft hat gelernt, den Fehler zu fürchten. Die Firma musste mitansehen, wie sich der Start des Betriebssystems Windows Vista [Windows 6] um Jahr und Tag verzögerte. Es war viel schwerer als gedacht, alle Fehler auszuräumen. Als Vista endlich auf den Markt kam, wirkte es sperrig, überfrachtet und mitunter quälend langsam."

"Windows 7 ist stabil, schnell und leicht zu bedienen. Es ist sogar elegant."

"Die Entwicklung [von Windows 6] war ingenieursgetrieben", sagt Microsoft-Sprecher Thomas Mickeleit. Von nun an, so viel stand fest, sollte der Kunde treiben. Nur: Wer war dieser Mensch?"

"Der Riese aus Redmond - 90.000 Mitarbeiter, 60 Milliarden Dollar Umsatz [...] gilt seit 34 Jahren als das Gegenteil von cool."

"Die Extremprogrammierer, wie sie sich nannten, zeigten die typische Strenge von Häretikern. Ihre Disziplin war die Antwort auf die bürokratische Verzettelung, die in der Software-Industrie damals um sich griff. Immer monströsere Programme wurden in Auftrag gegeben, mit Anforderungen oft hoffnungslos überfrachtet."

"Die kleinste Einheit vieler Entwicklergruppen bei Microsoft ist nun das Paar: je ein Programmierer und sein wachsamer Gegenpart. Die beiden hängen zusammen wie eine Zweierseilschaft, die durch eine Steilwand steigt: einer voraus, der andere sichert am Seil. Nur scheinbar ist das eine Vergeudung hochbezahlter Arbeitszeit. "Das Vieraugenprinzip hat die Fehlerzahl drastisch gesenkt", sagt Microsoft-Manager Fischer."

"Die gemeinsame Stunde der Wahrheit schlägt in Redmond täglich um 16 Uhr. Dann wird das gesamte Tagwerk der Programmierer, das "daily build", auf rund 5.000 Testrechner aufgespielt. Ein jeder hat seine Eigenarten: veraltete Festplatten, obskure Grafikprozessoren, schlecht programmierte Drittsoftware oder neueste Exotenprogramme. Hinzu kommt ein Simulator, der dem Betriebssystem etliche hundert Mäuse, Tastaturen und Scanner vorgaukelt."

"In jeder dieser elektronischen Lebenswelten muss sich das neue Windows bewähren. Nacht für Nacht durchläuft die Software hier ihre automatischen Testprozeduren. Die erste Vorabversion, die Microsoft zum öffentlichen Herunterladen freigab, trug die Nummer 7.100."

"Viele Projekte gerieten in Rückstand. Die Leiter schickten zusätzliche Programmierer ins Getümmel. Das machte alles noch schlimmer, denn mit steigender Kopfzahl wuchs auch der Abstimmungsbedarf."

"Spätestens seit der schier endlosen Geschichte von Windows Vista sind solche Schrecken auch den Entwicklern von Microsoft nicht ganz fremd. Windows 7 dagegen ist nun nach kaum zwei Jahren fast fertig. Und der Start wurde schon zweimal vorverlegt, zuletzt auf den 22. Oktober."

It looks like Microsoft managed the turnaround from a bumpy big company taking years for new error-prone releases, to a lean, focused, communication-driven, leading IT company with frequent, stable releases aligned at customers' needs. Back to the roots, congratulations!

I'm on Twitter

Now I'm also on Twitter .. I did resist three years (or was it two?) .. where I saw all those nerds at JavaOne hacking those small messages into the machine. I wrote about Twitter in my JavaOne conference report for JavaSPEKTRUM .. and now, I have one channel more to manage -- wow, cool! The first task was installing the bridge between my Twitter account and my Facebook account.

Tooling + Team = Agile

Pretty often I monitor anti patterns, suboptimal or even manual centric approaches and misuse of tools. As described a couple of times in my blog already or explained in my conference talks, workshops and seminars it is very important to create a setting of right tools which are used right -- aligned at the customers' individual requirements.

But tooling is only one recipe to work in an efficient and "Agile" way, the other is the team communication. A direct, open, constructive team communication is even more important than using the right tools right as you may remember from the first value pair of the Agile Manifesto. Yes, you may say "Natch! Those soft skills are widly spread". But also here I often monitor anti patterns which are of disadvantage for the customer.

If you want to learn more about Agile development with using the right tools (for your individual environment) in a cooperative atmosphere just to save money, increase motivation and finish your project successfully please read my book or join my bootcamp or my other seminars or wait for my second book :-). You may also want to drop me a line if you think you may have some room for improvement, or just need another unladen opinion.

Many of you ask me to write more and in more detail about tooling, teaming and best practices giving my opinion online .. many of my fellows do that, I know .. I'm sorry, but running already on 140% workload, .. I will point to performances here mainly, but .. ok, I will improve :-) Please monitor the performance area on my site to be informed about my articles and all this other stuff where I discuss Agile in more detail continuously ..

Addendum: Tooling + Team = Agile. Yes, you are right, it must say Tooling + Team + x = Agile. ;-)

Plumbers

This morning we had a plumber in our house. Our shower was defect in we gave him a call. What did he do? He installed a new hardware. But it was not only a default one -the cheapest on the market- it also has less features than the defect one. No, we do not want to fill the bath tube manually! To make matters worse the plumber wanted to bill 2 1/2 working hours for that, a task which took him 15 minutes. And he wanted to repair something totally different too, a part not defect at all. Of course this will go into another iteration.

Why do I write this? I think about some externals I worked with recently: billing (too many hours) for some activities which do not fit to the customer's goal, delivering the cheapest worst solution without synchronizing with the customer at all. The provided solution do provoke intensive manual activities continuously. Wow, there are some massive parallels between (bad) plumbers and (bad) IT consultants.

JavaOne 2009

TS-4421 "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and FEST"; June 05 2:50 PM - 3:50 PM, together with Alex Ruiz, Oracle

BOF-5394 "Improving the Java User Groups (JUGs)" June 04 7:30 PM - 8:20 PM, together with Dan Sline and John Yeary