Some news ...

Sun Microsystems invited me again to take part at the JavaOne 2008 in San Francisco in May. The biggest, most leading and thrilling Java conference in the world! Thank you very much, Sun! I'm also proud that I was in the group which reviewed the JavaOne submissions .. I'm thrilled about the program this year. Again fantastic! +++ Before, in March I will be guest at the JSFDays in Vienna meeting Ed Burns again and all these nice JSF guys. +++ I'm Zone Leader at JetBrains Zone at DZone. Join the zone and read leading reports and news about JetBrains and its products like IntelliJ IDEA, TeamCity ... +++ If you like to see me and learn more about agile development (what it really means, anti-patterns, infrastructure) you may want to join my 1-day seminar March 3rd (in German). +++ As you know I drive the Java User Group Cologne (JUGC) ... the next meeting is February, 11th. We have two talks then .. Johannes Link will speak about Groovy and Roman Strobl will visit us coming from Prague and speaks about NetBeans 6.0. Further details on jugcologne.org. Oh yes .. the JUGC changed its location for the regulars table .. it takes place every last Friday in the month in Bar Txangurro. Very nice there. And a last hint to the next JUGC talk .. I managed it to lure Dr. Neil Gafter (Google) to Cologne. He will speak on March 10th about a topic of your choice .. decide on the JUGC mailing list (enter it via JUGC site, right sidebar) if he will speak about Closures, Java Puzzlers, new language features in JDK 7 ... if you have an advanced question about Java, this is the chance to get it answered. You should come early this evening .. to get a seat for seeing and discussing with this JUGC rock star speaker !! +++ There is a small bunch of copies of my book available at Amazon again. Hurry up with ordering ;-) .. I guess also this re-order of Amazon will probably be sold out soon and O'Reilly has to fulfil the aimed reprint of copies ..

a batch of new copies

On Friday I got the message from my wonderful editor that O'Reilly wants to start a reprint of my book in a couple of weeks, not a complete new reprint but a new batch of copies including the same content. Not bad for a book which was published only three months before. After publishing the eBook that are the next interesting news ...

PDF version of my book is out

Meanwhile O'Reilly published my book as PDF too. Have a look here.

1. Auflage Dezember 2007
ISBN 978-3-89721-791-1
Seiten 432, PDF ca.13.7 MB
EUR36.00

As you remember the main site for the paper version is here. And further information and errata can be found here.

Amazon rating

Do you have any idea how Amazon rates the books? Seems like they fix the sales rank in real time. The rank of my book oscillates a bit over time.

O'Reilly interview

Today my publisher set an interview with me online on their main web site. Have a look on O'Reilly web site or directly on the interview site.

November, 23th Karlsruhe: XP Days and "Java User Group Karlsruhe"

On November, 23th I will make a trip to Karlsruhe. During the day I will join the XP Days 2007, the conference dedicated to agile development. My current plan is to join the following sessions:

"DSL am Beispiel Groovy" with Bernd Schiffer
"Agile Entwicklung einführen" with Jens Coldewey
"Das Ganze sehen" with Sabine Canditt and Jennifer Schiller
"Why Agile Projects fail" with Joseph Pelrine and Jiri Lundak
"Was folgt nach Scrum bei SAP?" with Christian Schmidkonz and Henrik Stotz

In my opinion the whole conference is nicely set up ... and I feel good about the output being in the program committee this year.

At 7.15 pm I will give the talk
"Developing Java Rich UI Applications"
for the Java User Group Karlsruhe at
Fachschaft Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe (TH)
Gebäude 50.34
Multimediahörsal im UG
Raum -101
Am Fasanengarten 5
76131 Karlsruhe

The topic is similar to the talk I gave in Hamburg some days ago. BTW: the talk in Hamburg was pretty interesting. About 100 people were count there. Thanks to Björn, Dirk and Daniel for inviting me and organizing the happening. Not only the talk was fun with some nice questions, but also the time afterwards. We had some drinks downtown ...

Expect several copies of my book as give-aways in Karlsruhe.

November, 14th: Lehmanns book store, Hamburg

On November, 14th I will follow an invitation and give a talk in the Lehmanns book store, Kurze Mühren 6, 20095 Hamburg. Host is Lehmanns and the Java User Group Hamburg. My talk will discuss an agile infrastructure to develop Java Rich UI Swing appliations. And beside that I present my book "Agile Java-Entwicklung in der Praxis".

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" is one value pair of the Agile Manifesto. Yes, communication is more important than tools, but this does not mean tools are unimportant. Far from it! Using the right tools right we will improve our quality significantly.

Starting with Subversion I will integrate TestNG, Jemmy and Fit to specify and drive the features. Complementary tools like Checkstyle for code metrics, EasyMock for test isolation and EMMA for code coverage optimize the process and the quality of our artifacts. We will use Eclipse as IDE and set up an continuous integration environment with Ant and CruiseControl.

If you will be there on Wednesday drop in, join the happening and say hello. I look forward talking to you.

Start is November, 14th at 8 pm.

Book in hands

My book is out! I have a copy on my shelf now. Please expect your copy delivered the next days.

Further information, details and errata can be found here.

Question of the day: What is agile?

What is "agile software development"?

(a) "Agile Development is a chaotic ad hoc development."
(b) "Agile Development is a product to sell. I'm a consultant and 'agile expert' and sell agile development although I do not understand the agile values and basic rules of successful together and team work. I'm the most important person in the project. I collect knowledge and do not share it as often as possible."
(c) "Agile Development means the whole team does 50 push-ups every morning before sitting at the computer."
(d) "Agile development is a set of rules and methods to increase the probability of successful finishing the IT project while having motivated engineers in real teams with respect for each other and helping peers, satisfied customers and relaxed project managers, managers and HR staff."
(e) "Agile what?"

Agile, agile, everywhere ...

My book is now listed by Amazon for being released October, 31th. The final version has 432 pages ... I think this is the best size for this topic -- not too thin like a newspaper, not too big like a blather tome.

The last days I gave some seminars. The seminars discussed tools and agile processes I have also written about in my book: firstly a seminar about agile testing of Java Swing applications using TestNG, JUnit, EMMA, EasyMock, CruiseControl, Ant and Jemmy. The seminar was good received and gave me some insight in interesting participant projects. Another seminar was Maven 2. In two days we set up a repository working with JUnit 3, JUnit 4, Checkstyle, JavaDocs, remote and local repositories ..., generated a customized site ... and had a lot of fun.

It is so important that you choose the right tools for your project. There is no "golden hammer", a set of tools that fits everywhere. Every project is different. In one project Ant may be best in another project Maven. One project may profit most from CruiseControl others from Continuum or TeamCity. There is not the one and only infrastructure ... but a tool set of very good de facto standard tools.

... and yes! "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" is the first value pair of the Agile Manifesto. Humans are working in projects, different characteristics you have to bring together to build up a real team. A team where all respect and help each other, where is no room for vanity fair, for persons always wanting to be in the limelight. If you have a team and the right tools, you have a very big chance to finish your IT project very successfully.

book release

My book "Agile Java-Entwicklung in der Praxis" will be released in October. The last weeks O'Reilly set the final print. I reviewed it, gave some last feedback and re-created several screenshots. I have to say the quality management of O'Reilly is absolutely excellent. Now the time is come where the book is 100% in the internal publisher process ...

Agile projects vs. non-agile projects

One point I mention in my book is that projects often call themselves "agile" but are everything but agile. In agile projects the whole team has respect to its members, and communicates in an advisable form -- no bubble! "Agile" is not a "product" to sell, agile is a basic attitude. All people do want to archieve the best for the projects, ask if something isn't clear, anti-patterns like a collected in my Wikipedia article, are seldom. Selfish behaviour is a no-no as well as people who always got to be in the limelight.

If you do want to learn more about the best approach for agile teams, when a so called "agile team" is not an agile team and if you want to read about the concrete advantages of agile processes ... please read my book. It is also of value if you want to learn about the infrastructure, the tools to use in order to support an agile process. Although agile projects do focus on basic values also tools are very, very important in order to accomplish the daily tasks (like Test-Driven Development, Continous Integration, testing of components, functional testing of Java Swing applications, functional testing of web applications, Software-Configuration Management, Standards and a lot more ...).

Further gold plating ....

Today I had a workshop with my lector. We commited on doing some further adjustments and gold plating. There was a good proposal submitted by one censor which I include definitely. As a consequence there will be one further, new chapter ...

Finishing the book to be published in August (the current schedule) could be tough under these conditions, so expect it a bit later. Quality over time.

My book, final spurt ...

I'm currently doing some last adjustments on my book "Agile Softwareentwicklung in der Praxis". Recently I received some further feedback from censors and my lector. Beside that during my seminar on "Agile testing of Java Swing applications" in-house last week I got a very helpful suggestion I want to include into the book, too. The book will be published end of August. It took me about one year of writing ... I think I will write a different post about my experiences, why I wrote this book and my long journey of writing and finishing it.