Jax London 2010

I attended to JAX London 2010 for two days. Here are my impressions of some of the talks i attended there:

Jax Keynote: The Busy Developer’s Guide to Iconoclasm

When ted was a kid the rule was to go to school, get a good job an make good money.
But the formula is changing. In countries like India, China or Poland developers get a lot less than in the western countries.
But automation threatens programmers more than all the other outsourcing sources ever could.

But there is a guy who had an idea, that make a million dollars. You can be that guy, an iconoclast.
A iconoclast in Teds definition is a person who does something that others say can’t be done.

This, then, to overcome the automation trap is your goal: become an iconoclast.

There are three things for iconoclasts to do:

seeing differnetly – To see different, you must change your perception.
overcoming fear – Fear can drive bad decision-making. It’s ok tho feel it. But don’t let the fear win.
use social intelligence – For an iconoclst social interaction and reputation is important. Talk about what you do, or nobody will ever notice it.

Jax Session: Agile Coaching Secrets

Rachel Davies

Rachel is an agile Coach. She helps teams to work with agile technics. In Kent Becks book the agile coach was
described as somebody who helps the team. And try to help from the back.
Agile coaching is like planting. Create an environment for the team to grow their own agile practice.
Where to start. Use your agile technices for planing. And introduce new things in every sprint.

Get to know the team.
Agile is not usually the real goal. Ask for the goal.
People resist change. Focus on benefit to the team.
Don’t make a plan how to transform the team. Do what the team want to try out.
Give advice sparingly. Leave room for team ideas.
Respect experience. Tap into the team wisdom.
Ask questions.
Be an example.
Identify concerns. Make blockers visible.
Differnt angles. Step back to see the big picture
Take time out to reflect
Changes takes time. Be patient. (Thats the hardest part of agile coaching)

Jax Session: OSGi and Java EE: Friends or Foes?

Mike Keith

Java EE and OSGi comparison:

Java EE	OSGi
Logical component – level dependencies	Package level code dependencies
Unit of deployment: JAR	Unit of deployment: Bundle
Interface-based services as EJB components	Interface based services as classes in bundles
Component life cycle callback hooks	Bundle and framework life cycle callback notification
JNDI under container control	Service registry shared bundle access
Application code strictly controlled	No real application coding constraints

Coming Soon:
Enterprise Spec (JSR 291 – OSGi as part of JCP) goal is to provide a way to host Java EE technologies on OSGi.

Distributed Teams: Creating Proximity over a Distance

Jutta Eckstein

Jutta gaves an excellent talk about distributed teams in agile projects. These are the key success factor to make a global team effective:

building trust
encouraging open communication
building personal relationships
bridging cultural differnces

To achieve this factor with your team you have to do face to face meetings. Frequency and duration depend on the distance. A good idea are differnt meeting locations. Change who will be the host and who needs to travel.

You should pay attention to your vocabulary. Nightly build, morning call or remote site are mostly the termes are used from the sight of the headquarter.

Teams should be responsible to deliver a feature. Not responsible for middleware or userinterface. If you have middleware people at location A and userinterface people only in location B you have to build a dispersed feature team. Disperse teams split accros different locations.

To overcome cultural differences you have to foxus on similarities rather than on differences. You have to create a joint project culture with a common vision, rules values and mututal respect.