Hudson@tutego

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

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)

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!

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.

JUGC, GeeCON, SQS Conference, Javamagazin, Agile 2009 ...

My last post was some days ago .. so here I catch up with a couple of news. The last Java User Group Cologne event on February, 9th was a big success. We had an advanced talk about AOP. Additionally I managed to get Corneliu Vasile Creanga from Adobe to Cologne to talk about Flex, Air and the integration to Java. Stay tuned for the next events and prepare yourself for some surprises. ;-)

GeeCON invited me to give a talk in Cracow in May. I will talk about "From Zero to Hero: Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296) and FEST". Thank you, looking forwarding visiting you fantastic guys and that lovely city.

Also in May I will give a workshop about "Agile Testing of Java Rich Clients" during the SQS Software & Systems Quality Conference 2009. Beside agile concepts, functional/acceptance/component testing and general GUI testing strategies the workshop will cover a full-fledged infrastructure to test and inspect the design/code of your application. Tools discussed are Findbugs, Checkstyle, EMMA, TestNG, FEST, EasyMock, PMD, Fit, Ant, Maven, a continuous integration server and a couple of others. Beside other frameworks and solutions I will also discuss JavaFX. Looking forward giving that interactive power workshop.

The current isse 3.2009 of Javamagazin published my article about IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 and RubyMine. Check it out if you like to be informed about what is going on at the bleeding edge of IDE development.

March, 3rd the Agile 2009 will close its call for papers. I'm responsible for the Tools for Agility track. Many good submissions already went in .. expect a great program.

I'm in the program committee of JavaOne 2009. A bunch of talks were already accepted, many are still in review. It is hard to filter the best and most interesting talks out of those billions submissions. You can already register for the worlds best and biggest Java conference -- sorry, Stephan ;-) -- taking place in San Francisco beginning of June.

Session proposal "Refactoring from Visio to Powerpoint, and Prefactoring to Code"

Recently the following proposal for Agile 2009 come to my mind:

“Refactoring from Visio to Powerpoint, and Prefactoring to Code” — A practical guide for an agile architect. The presented patterns and Web 2.0 tools show how architects can cope with recent challenges in designing complex n-tier, scalable systems and generating code seemlessly. The automated process transforms design artifacts from PowerPoint to Visio (extended pattern catalogue for roundtrip-engineering in progress) and prefactors the artifacts to working Assembler code. This process is fully SOA enabled.

Process/Mechanics
We will finish with a real world cloud computing demo.

Learning outcomes
* learn how to refactor from Visio to Powerpoint
* learn how to prefactor to working code

Level: Expert

If you also have a paper you want to propose, perhaps a more realistic one, go to the agile tooling track and submit your paper .. looking forward seeing your submissions! :-)

Agile 2009's Tools for Agility Stage: CfP is opened!

The Agile 2009 conference opened its CfP. I'm the responsible producer of the agile tooling track this year .. looking forward seeing your submissions! :-)

Being part of the FEST team ..

Since a couple of days I'm team member of the project FEST - Fixtures for Easy Software Testing. That's really awesome .. FEST is very cool especially for efficient and agile testing of Swing clients. I used it myself for some time now and became a contributor and power user. Looking forward to the next tasks .. at the moment finalizing and going public with version 1.0 of the Swing testing framework (and the companion frameworks) is the most recent job on the roadmap. Thanks!

Tooling infrastructure for agile projects

The current issue 6.2008 of JavaSPEKTRUM contains my article "Eine technologische Infrastruktur für agile Projekte" describing a tooling infrastructure for agile projects. Balanced at the building blocks SCM, testing, VCS, Continuous Integration and Standards/Audits I discuss the right use of right tools like Maven, TestNG, FEST, Fit, EMMA, TeamCity, Subversion, Trac. Actually you can apply the concepts, tools and patterns in agile and also in more traditional process models. The article is a compact overview, for more details and a more big picture you should read my book. :-)

Agile 2009 - Tools for Agility Stage Producer

Next year the biggest and best dedicated Agile software development conference "Agile" will take place in Chicago, Aug 26-29 2009. It is a big honour that I'm the stage producer responsible for the tooling track. The call for submission is almost finished and will be published soon. Before I assemble a smart review team I can already announce that I will have John Smart in my team as the assistance stage producer. John is a well-known agile tooling guy. Thank you John for joining the team!

Agile Tooling talk at Devoxx

December 8th I will give a talk at the Devoxx (formerly known as Javapolis) conference in Antwerp, Belgium, about Agile Testing of Java Rich Clients. In this session we show how to test Java Rich Client applications in a comprehensive and sophisticated way. Firstly we write component tests with TestNG. Then we write functional acceptance in HTML with Fit. We bind our Fit-tests to TestNG in order to bridge the technical barrier between unit and functional tests. Visual components are driven and tested by FEST in a sophisticated fluent interface notation. These facets are part of a full-fledged infrastructure based on Maven. Practical tips and and best-practices do complete this highly interactive session.

You will also meet me at the JUG leaders event December, 10th and I think there will be a Java Champions gathering too. If you are interested in having a coffee together at European's best Java conference drop me a line! My schedule is full with official and semi-official meetings and events, but we will definitely find a minute! :-)

Functional Testing of RIAs

The recent JavaSpektrum issue 5.2008 contains my article about "Functional Testing of Rich Internet Applications". After discussing concepts und best-practices in the context of testing web applications I introduce the two leading and free testing tools WebTest and Selenium. After a deep comparison I include both frameworks (respectively example projects) into a continuous integration process based on TeamCity. If you are interested in reading the German article you may take a look here.

XPDays program online

The program of this year's XPDays. the German confernce on agile topics, is online. The happening will take place end of November and consists of three different days: November 27th, there will be a one track program with different general talks. Day two on 28th is the main conference with three parallel tracks, day three a community day with open space formats. I was part of the program organisation this year and I'm happy with the program itself and the split to three different days including the Community Day.

Java Conference Munich: September, 12th

For a pretty long time I planned to travel to Munich in summer or autumn to visit some old friends for a tasty wheat bear in some nice locations. Now we commited to September and I scheduled September, 11th to September, 13th for my journey. Actually in that week there is the Jahrestagung of the GI event including a Java Conference on September 12th. So very practical to give a talk during the day before jumping into Munich's night life. If you will be there in that time slot and want to chat a bit please let me know and we may get in touch .. ah ok, I forgot to mention that in my talk I will speak about sophisticated testing of rich clients.

What is a "Team" ?

Working in teams is essential for running IT projects successfully. But what distinguishes a group from a team? First of all a team is a working group assembled for a longer time to accomplish a goal. The performance of a team is more than the sum of performances of the individual team members. Its members communicate face to face, have respect to each other, avoid any kind of team killer phrases and do not work in ivory towers. The working style of the team can be characterized as cooperative interaction and a collective spirit of responsiblity. In the daily work the boundaries of roles like "the specialist" or "the integrator" as well as disciplinal hierarchies or grades like "junior" or "senior" skilled members are resolved and melt. The team is driven by team spirit and a strong group cohesiveness. Teams often have rituals and renounce vanity fair and jealousy. Seeing that most failed projects fail because of communication problems and for social reasons and very, very seldom because of technical reasons it is more than necessary to form, establish and support the team sense. Unfortunately you are never sure if a working group will emerge to a real team. But if it forms to be a team .. the probability of finishing the project successfully increases dramatically. And: Working in teams makes just pure fun!

German print article: "Agile Testing of Rich UI Applications"

The recent edition 02/2008 of the JavaSpektrum contains my german article about agile testing of rich Java UI applications named "Agiles Testen von Java-Rich-UI-Anwendungen" -- a subset of my book.

I explain a smooth infrastructure combining the frameworks Fit, TestNG and Jemmy to drive the development of your Java Swing applications drafted with a concrete use case. The use case, the test and specification artifacts, a build script and a small glue module are available for download here.

Beside the frameworks and the integration I show the run in Eclipse and discuss agile best-practices along the way including anchoring the setting into a CI-server like TeamCity. Also mocking and architectural considerations are kept in mind.

You may buy a copy or just the PDF if you like.

German abstract:

"Dieser Artikel möchte das Verständnis für das Testen von Rich-UI-Anwendungen schärfen. Er stellt die drei kostenlosen Werkzeuge TestNG, Fit und Jemmy vor, mit deren Hilfe Swing-Anwendungen umfassend getestet werden können. Eine Integration von Fit/Jemmy-Akzeptanztests und TestNG-Komponententests führt zu schnellen Rückkopplungen. Anhand eines Beispiels wird eine Integration dieser Werkzeuge vorgestellt, die hilft, die technische Barriere zwischen den komplementären Komponenten- und Akzeptanztests zu überwinden."

Dr. Neal Gafter @ JUGC and VIP

Last Monday, March, 10th, Dr. Neal Gafter gave a talk for the Java User Group Cologne ... and it was an awesome one .. to be correct, it was more than one talk. But let's start at the beginning. I met Neal at noon at the central station in Cologne and we did some sightseeing through Cologne. We were in the Colgone Dom, its treasure room, went to the Rhine, through the old town, I did show him some remaining parts of the past city wall .. actually it was a still existing gate to the city.

Later on we met Ann Oreshnikova, marketing director from JetBrains. We had some further hours of fun together in the city. We went to different breweries, the Früh and the Päffgen, had some local beers and local food .. before going to the event location at about 6 pm. There everything was set up nicely again as always .. with a nice Kölsch buffet (buffet with food and drinks typical for Cologne).

At 7 pm the rooms were full .. about 90 persons attended Neal's first talk in Germany. Neal gave his 60-minutes talk about JDK 7 Language changes .. explaining what should be done in the JDK and why .. he pointed out that it is important to do some cleaning up in the JDK with the coming release e.g. in the area of Generics and Switch Statements. More long-term with a target release of JDK 8 he sees some more features in the language to evolve it naturally -- especially Closures. Closures are pretty easy to use, he said, are transparent for the developer and are not really rocket science .. many other languages have them already and for a long time.

Neal pointed out that "reading" is much more important than "writing" .. you write code once, but you read it very often. So the code must be easy to understand.

After about 60 minutes he was done and answered many questions ... the plan was to postpone all questions to later at the evening .. but there was so much hot reaction .. so we did a Q&A part.

After a 10 minutes break then Ann presented some Javascript puzzlers to the audience. Very, very interesting what is possible in this area and seeing some pitfalls! After that Neal asked the audience what they wanted to hear next. :-) He took his Closures talk out of his bag and gave it completely. Afterwards and in between he answered many, many questions and very interesting discussions arised about Java, Groovy and 10000 topics.

We then distributed five IntelliJ IDEA full-licenses to lucky winners and over a hand full of O'Reilly books while doing a raffle. It was clearly after midnight (!) we were done with this "official" part of the show. We then went down to a bar beside for some further beer.

The event itself lasted over five hours -- many thanks to Neal for coming to Cologne for this great show, your absolutely outstanding performance and your time. I personally learned a lot .. also some non-technical stuff e.g. about the working conditions at Google. I knew some facts before, what I did not know was: employee reviews and ratings are done only by peers!! The manager does not have any influence on that. Isn't that great!?! I'm a supporter of agile disciplines but I very often ask myself in projects .. "Why is this called agile here"? It is about selling an "agile" product very often without understanding the core facets of collaboration being in competition with peers. Walking Google's way you have to help your peers, be polite without any vanity fair, accelerating information exchange ... Many projects should do that .. in regular, short intervals.

Thanks again to Neal and to Ann for your time.

JetBrains Tracker

Recently JetBrains migrated the issue tracking of the leading continuous integration and collaboration platform TeamCity from Jira to JetBrains' own and new ticketing system JetBrains Tracker. JetBrains eats its own dog food again here. JetBrains Tracker was developed some time ago already, is very feature-rich and candy for your eyes. Stay tuned to the further development of this awesome ticketing system.

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 ..