July 26, 2010 in links by Clara Ko
This is the second in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable Agile teams to be successful. Diversity of gender, culture, opinion, perspective, skills and background is considered to be an important factor in forming and persisting high-performance teams. This news item examines the perspectives from variety of commentators.
July 1, 2010 in Uncategorized by Orianne Tisseuil
Coucou les filles !
J’organise dans le cadre du Poitou-Charentes JUG une journée complète de conférences Java à La Rochelle : le Jug Summer Camp.
Le JUG Summer Camp 2010 se tient le vendredi 10 septembre à La Rochelle. Venez toutes profiter des derniers rayons de soleil de l’été pour une rencontre privilégiée avec les acteurs de la communauté Java dans un cadre magnifique.
Emmanuel Bernard, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Julien Dubois, Nicolas de Loof, et bien d’autres ont répondu présent et vous proposent des présentations de haut niveau réparties sur deux tracks.
L’évènement est francophone, gratuit et ouvert à tous (et toutes ! 
). N’hésitez pas à en parler autour de vous.
Le site de la conférence, à deux pas de la gare TGV, est un cadre confortable et convivial pour profiter de cette journée dans les meilleures conditions… et pourquoi pas la poursuivre par un week-end sur la côte Atlantique 
Inscrivez-vous vite sur http://www.jugsummercamp.org/inscriptions
Plus d’informations sur http://www.jugsummercamp.org
Voilà !
J’espère que je pourrai croiser plusieurs d’entre vous là bas.
Bonne soirée à toutes,
Orianne.
June 26, 2010 in events by Duchess
The Zone—San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko, Hilton San Francisco, and Parc 55 hotels and the surrounding area—will be dedicated to developers during the week of JavaOne and Oracle Develop.
Unparalleled education and practical hands-on sessions, engaging activities, exceptional entertainment, and food and drink in the Zone will be exclusively geared toward the developer community converging at the two conferences. Network, share information, and learn from leading experts in the Java, PL/SQL, rich internet application development, SOA communities, and more.
Discount may have been arranged by your local JUG. Check with your local JUG.
June 26, 2010 in events by Duchess
Java2Days conference is premier event in Eastern Europe to present the latest trends in Java development in the following areas:
The second Java2Days will be held at the Inter Expo Center on 8-9 October, 2010, in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The conference is the first of its kind to be held in Eastern Europe, focused to highlight today’s cutting edge trends in building software applications with Java development tools.
Over two days, more than 600 attendees will meet world famous lecturers, engaged all year round in such events as JavaOne, The ServerSide Java Symposium, Jazoon showcasing their latest knowledge in creating more reliable, scalable and secure solutions using Java technologies in more than 20 technical sessions.
The major purpose of the event is to become a place for passionate Java developers to get in touch with the latest technologies, to become a significant part of the global Java community and to learn from the best.
For Duchess members, we have received a generous offer from the conference organizers: 10 free conference passes (Economy Pass) for each invited official Java User Group and 40% discount of every next pass.
If you want to go, get in touch.
June 26, 2010 in events by Duchess
XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.
The 8th edition XP Days will also be held in Kapellerput in Heeze, near Eindhoven.
June 20, 2010 in events by Duchess
We’ve applied for a Duchess BOF at Devoxx 2010. Come join us so we can meet each other and find out what has been going on in the Duchess community and how you can get involved.
June 18, 2010 in articles by Clara Ko
Yesterday, I attended a lean architecture seminar given by Xebia. Gerard Janssen, Gero Vermaas, Sander van den Berg, and Denis Koelewijn did a good job in putting together the seminar and taking us through an introduction of Lean Principles and then applied to architecture to become Lean Architecture Prinicples. During the seminar, we discussed architectural challenges and also learned how architecture was done at Bol.com as presented by Serge Beaumont. I left the session re-inspired on how to approach architecture improvements at my current place of work.
Architecture
The 3 C’s of Architecture was introduced: Connection, Cohesion, and Changeability.
You can read about the 3 C’s of Architecture here: http://blog.xebia.com/2010/04/23/the-three-cs-of-architecture/
But here’s my spin:
On first glance, it is not really obvious what is meant by connection. What is meant is: connection to organizational goals. Architecture should be aligned to organizational and business goals and add value by facilitating the achievement of these goals.
Another word for Cohesion is Consistency. I often look for consistency in architecture, software, documents, etc. Consistency is standardization that pays off because it reduces the effort in understanding the architecture, software, documents, thereby reducing time and costs when implementing further changes.
Modern wisdom says that we should architect for change, because “change is the only constant”. For me, the raison d’etre of architecture is to manage complexity thereby ensuring changeability and minimizing the cost of future changes. This is because by definition, software is complex, but the complexity can be managed.
Lean Principles
The Lean Principles that were introduced are:
The above principles can be further distilled into 3 quick-win actions:
#1 is a quick-win that I have employed and continue to employ. For example, it’s amazing how a continuous integration tool can do to focus the team, and give a pulse on progress.
#2 and #3 are closely related. What we know is that flow is more important than resource optimization. Ensuring the flow by making sure that intermediate products do not pile up often result in faster delivery than if all resources continue to produce at 100% capacity despite the fact that the next person/team in line is not ready. This is counter-intuitive for traditional project management, which is still very prevalent in most large organizations, and it is up to us to teach the concept of flow and other lean principles.
Other resources on lean principles that I have found useful are:
Principles distill best practices into simple concepts that help us focus on what we need to do. Often, we all know the concepts, but the hard part is the implementation. By putting “abstract” lean principles into the context of architecture, it helps to visualize what needs to be done and brings us one step closer to applying the principles in our specific situations.
Lean Architecture Principles
“Lean Architecture enforces value creation by balancing business and technical values/priorities and converging focus of all stakeholders to required actions at the right time and at the right level of details.”
The Lean Architecture Principles that were introduced are:
Each principle is further elaborated in the Xebia blog here: http://blog.xebia.com/category/lean-architecture/
Architectural Challenges
Later, we broke into groups to discuss which Lean Architecture Principles can be applied to solve one of the architectural challenges that we came up with. We chose to discuss the challenge of determining how far we should look for architecture. 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?
My first comment is that it’s not about time. It’s about creating a vision and then creating a roadmap (Think big, act small) towards that vision. The time is only an estimate of how long it would take us to get to the vision, which is not really that relevant since architectural improvement should be a continuous process (Incremental development of architecture) and each step is measured for business value. Many of us work in organizations where there is a fair amount of legacy system. When designing from scratch, we know that we should design loosely coupled, flexible systems, but what do we do with systems that are already there? One solution is to create a backlog of architecture changes/refactorings and wait for the chance to include them into project backlogs when the time comes. The architecture backlog should be communicated widely so there will be no surprise.
An insight from Theo Maas of KLM is: “Architecture must mirror your business processes. Even when the organizational structure changes, the business processes often stay the same.”
I would go one step further to say that lean principles can be applied to the business processes themselves to eliminate waste.Companies that dare to improve their processes can benefit from reduced costs and increased productivity in their day-to-day operations. When this is done with business and IT in close collaboration, IT can add value by supporting the new (more efficient) processes.
Bol.com: Service Discovery Workshop
Serge Beaumont shared with us his experience at Bol.com, where he started to run Service Discovery Workshops with full participation from +/- 20 people from all departments and functions who got together to discuss architecture and initiate architectural changes (All hands on deck early on). The goal was to create an architecture that would keep them in business until 2013. I think it is brilliant that people at Bol.com have the foresight to make the effort early on and collaborate on architecture. A simple model was followed to structure the workshop:
Conclusion
This seminar has inspired me to refocus my efforts on initiating architectural improvements at my current place of work. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to discuss with fellow architects the common challenges and solutions for initiating architectural changes in organizations. This has confirmed for me what I have known all along and have been doing for awhile, which is that architecture includes both content knowledge as well as process knowledge, and where success is contingent on the ability to initiate and lead changes in both. As with many good ideas, the concepts are simple, but the implementation is hard. I hope that doing my part to spread the word on what we know as a community will help others to improve architecture in their companies.
May 18, 2010 in articles by Clara Ko
It’s been a year since I attended a bootcamp for Sun Certified Enterprise Architect and I noticed that I never published these study tips. The course went from fundamental architectural concepts to using current Java technology to design software.
I really liked learning the SunTone Architecture Methodology – specifically the SunTone cube, which helped me visualize and make connections to infrastructure. What I liked less is the focus on Java design patterns, some of which are outdated, and a focus on (although a little understandably) Sun technology. The problem is these days – knowing the Sun way of doing things (EJB3, JSF, etc) is not the only choice. There is definitely a gap there for a more comprehensive Java Architecture course that comprises of all mainstream Java technology and help make the choices between them. Overall, I found that it was a good opportunity to focus and learn for a week on architecture and design. I’m glad to find that UML is still relevant in the face of agile development, although people haven’t talked about it much in more than 10 years.
SunTone Architecture Methodology
To aid in the development of enterprise applications, Sun Java Center formulated the SunTone Architecture Methodology (SunTone AM) in the late 90’s. Enhancing RUP with the SunTone cube, it has now evolved to have more agile influences. SunTone AM introduced the SunTone cube to describe primary concerns in enterprise applications. The three faces on the cube represented layers, tiers, and systemic qualities.
Layers
Layers are usually in the domain of infrastructure architects, where the application sits on top of infrastructure components.
Tiers
Tiers are well-known to application architects. They describe how an application is decomposed into modules to reduce coupling and enhance system flexibility. Annoyingly, tiers are sometimes called layers, when not in the context of SunTone.
Systemic Qualities
Systemic qualities help establish the quality of service that a system can deliver. Different systemic qualities impose different constraints on the design of a system. This list correlates to Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) that when prioritized help make choices in system design that take quality, time, and costs into consideration.
The Multiple Choice Exam
A lot of passing the exam has to do with learning the terminology.
The multiple choice exam tests knowledge from roughly 8 areas:
Resources
May 7, 2010 in events by Duchess
Agile Open Holland is the conference by and for you! Organized by Agile Holland, it is an Open Space conference, where the program is made by the participants at the start of each conference day. You can propose discussions, workshops, simulations, games, coding dojos, whatever topics and formats you are passionate about and want to take responsibility for.
Since the conference is what you make it, you’ll come back to work re-energized, filled with fresh ideas to make your work more fun, more productive and more profitable.
May 1, 2010 in events by Duchess Netherlands
Coding Dojos are inspired by the Socratic Circle, a learning method that involves questions and debate between participants and teacher, illuminating different points of views.
Come learn and practice TDD (Test-Driven Development) with FitNesse, an acceptance testing framework that enables you to communicate progress with business and customers, while improving your programming skills.
You are welcomed to join us on Friday evening, June 18, in the Amsterdam Public Library (Openbaar Bibliotheek Amsterdam) – next to Amsterdam Central Station – for a coding dojo with a focus on TDD with FitNesse.
We are very happy to have Marc Evers from QWAN and Agile Holland lead us through this dojo.
We will start at the La Place upstairs (7th floor) for food at 18:00 and will move to the meeting room (6th floor) to start at 19:00 and go until 22:00 at the latest.
We ask a voluntary 10 Euro participation fee to cover expenses.
Please sign up each attendee individually so we can track attendance.
Space is limited to 20 participants – so first come first serve!
The Amsterdam Public Library is easily accessible by public transport or car.
For those who want to drive, Parkeergarage Oosterdok is the closest parking garage.
