Robby van Damme

What: an interoperability stack for Java - .NET3.0/3.5

What's in it:

• Web services with reliabiltiy (guaranteed delivery/order of delivery)
• Transacted services
• Security (meaning more than SSL)

It's built for Sun's GlassFish appserver, but runs in Tomcat too.

Microsoft already released .NET 3.5 with the latest version of the spec.  Sun is expecting to release somewhere in June.

Good work, but little chance I'll be using it soon...

More info on:

https://metro.dev.java.net/

A presentation with a few answers to real world problems: nice!

I'm not going to copy the documentation of unitils (http://www.unitils.org/) here, but do would like to point out one recommendation:

If you want to have efficient datadriven tests, then you should disable your foreign keys and not null constraints...

Not a stupid idea - I'm going to try this out.

These 2 talks explained practical experiences with a project using Scrum.

Tip for (at least one of) the speakers: don't read your text from a piece of paper.

Having had some Scrum experiences myself, I'll stick to the things that were worthwhile writing down here:

• Achievement is not the same as activity (personally I prefer "doing your best is not the same as having success", but I guess that's a matter of personal flavor
• Sprint backlog with 4 cols: todo, in progress, funct test, done (we didn't use the functional test stage)
• use a burndown graph to maeasure progress
• determine your velocity to  estimate/ follow progress
• organize sprint retrospective meeting (no more than 90 min)
• do the scrum meeting standing (some people aren't gonna like this one ;-)
• Play planning poker to estimate, using the technique of story points and only fibonacci numbers (are a perhaps a variation?)
• If you can't estimate (SPIKE requirements): organize a poc to be able to estimate afterwards
• try to automate functional tests (Selenium framework for web apps - I'm definitily going to try this)
• non-dedicated resources decreases efficiency (I've this happening too often...)
• scrum master does the fire fighting, especially in the first sprints (well, what should I say - if it's only a few sprints, that's GOOD)
• Putthe team together (I agree, this really works)
• SCRUM does not solve your problems, it only makes them visible (but you must be willing to see)
• Scrum doesn't mean you don't document, it means documenting in a smart way
• Empower the team and take a distance (beware: the team must be ready for this)

This guy knew what he was talking about.

Why the hell do something about dependency mgmt?

• be able to replace components with minimal effort
• better quality (dependencies result in bugs)
• enable faster change  of the product

Tools can help:

• textual/graphical analysis tools don't really help (not usable)
• what does work: DSM (Dependency structure matrix).
• The DSM tool in IntelliJ IDEA looked impressive : scales well, looks good

How to organize DM:

-> Define the rules and make sure everybody sticks with them !

What can you do about them once you know you have them:

• move code
• extract interfaces/superclasses
• copy (may be ugly)
• pull members up
• introduce parameters
• replace constructors with factory methods
• Service locator design pattern
• Use inversion of control
• Dependency injection

I have my concerns about these last 2: you still have the dependencies, but instead of having them at compile time (in code) you have them at runtime (eg in xml when using Spring)