Java SIG March 14, 2006 Lecture

Abstract

Software professionals often balance their time between interacting with business people, performing technical design, and coding, testing and debugging. If insufficient time is available for these activities due to factors such as tight deadlines and changing requirements, software quality will suffer, and projects may fail. Increasing the number of developers on a project to meet a tight deadline many argue is actually likely to have a negative effect on overall project success.

Successful projects employing Agile principles reveal that individual and process efficiency is essential to success, through face-to-face communication, lightweight design tools, etc. In that same vein, if developers can code, test and debug more efficiently without compromising quality, they are more valuable and project success is more likely.

The presenter will show how such development efficiency can be achieved through optimizing repetitive tasks. The presentation will provide a hands-on look at a variety of techniques. Examples of techniques and tools to be shown are:

• Time-saving IDE conveniences/plugins (most applicable to both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA)
• Ant build script optimizations
• Firefox Developer plugins - Selenium IDE, Live HTTP Headers, "Web Developer"
• Runtime Control of Application Logging for troubleshooting
• Weblogic-specific deployment time reduction techniques

About The Speaker

Tom Wadzinski Tom Wadzinski is a Senior Software Consultant at Object Partners, Inc., in Minneapolis. A recent returnee to the Midwest, Tom worked at software startup companies in Boston for the last several years. Tom is an Agile methodologies enthusiast and has been developing primarily on JEE.