• Comparison of several agile methods (eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Crystal and Feature Driven Development)
• A guide to becoming agile
• Collaboration in Java Projects (IBM Rational’s Jazz)
• Scrum roles and their meaning for agile teams
• Field report of a Product Owner
• Agile project management with contracts for services

I think it is a good start to see the different methods at the beginning of the day to have a better understanding for the following more specialized topics. I hope to get a very good insight into agile methods and agile project management as everybody is talking about it and there are often also very controversial interpretations of what agile really is. Of course, there are and must be always different opinions about such things. After all, it’s not about the name or definition of a method, it’s about the success that the applied strategy is supposed to deliver…

I’m looking forward to the atmosphere and knowledge that is present at “Europe’s No. 1 conference for Enterprise Technology and Strategy” in Wiesbaden’s Rhein-Main-Hallen. Last year, we didn’t follow the whole conference but joined in only on Wednesday for the second and third main days. Additionally, we attended the workshop for model-driven development with Eclipse and openArchitectureWare which was very interesting.

However, this year we decided against a workshop in favor of attending the whole main conference. What we didn’t change is the hotel where we will have dinner and sleep: Hotel Rheineck.

Stay tuned for more information about the conference: The hotel provides free internet access via Wireless LAN ;)

• Contract pokering and requirements engineering
  Chris Rupp and Annette Haupt, SOPHIST GmbH – very good speakers
  What needs to be defined in a contract, as few as possible <-> as much as necessary?
  Words by themselves are meaningless, they are only defined for a common social background/experience.
  Different stages of knowledge define how detailed customers will specify requirements and what their (implicit) expectations are.
  RCDA-process: Require, Commit, Deliver, Accept
• Keynote: The Role of Java EE in Enterprise SOA Development at SAP
  Harald Müller, SAP
• Keynote: Java IDE(s) – The, Now and Eventually
  David “I” Intersimone, Code Gear
• Building Server-Side Eclipse based web applications – Part 1
  Jochen Hiller, BOS and Gunnar Wagenknecht, Truition – good speakers, technically experienced
  Equinox base for a web server using Jetty as a servlet container, can run standalone or deployed as a standard WAR inside any application server.
  Full use of extension mechanism for web app development.
• Java SE 6 only
  Adam Bien – very good speaker
  Discussion of several standard features in Java SE 6; proposal to use those as long as there are no further requirements -> eliminates dependencies to numerous frameworks, that may be superfluous anyway.
  ServiceLoader, XMLEncoder/-Decoder, JMX, DynamicProxy, CORBA, RMI, built-in scripting engines, Swing with sophisticated L&Fs;
  Domain Driven Design and Cross Cutting Concerns were also addressed at the end of the talk
• Object-oriented Enterprise Java with Spring and AspectJ
  Eberhard Wulff, Interface21 – this time less motivated than yesterday somehow
  Spring template mechanism; exception translation -> this looks interesting e.g. for transforming error codes of stored procedures to custom exceptions; dependency injection; distributed applications, Spring Exporter, Proxy, HttpInvoker; Acegi Security System for Spring, annotation based security declaration -> this looks interesting, shoud review this some day.

Tomorrow will be the power workshops, where we will especially attend MDD with Eclipse. But we may also look into some of the other groups, if there is room for it.

• Rating of software architectures, Part 1: Method
  Dr. Gernot Starke – very good speaker
  Experience is required for rating architectures; functional requirements are not enough; Quality tree -> ISO…, ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (SEI))
• SOA – Defining services from a business point of view
  Lars Roewekamp, OpenKnowledge GmbH – ok, slides hardly readable from the back (small fonts)
  Some interesting thoughts about structuring services and service operations according to business requirements rather than existing IT architectures.
• Keynote: Bringing Web 2.0 in the Enterprise
  Rahul Patel (Oracle)
• Persistence with Spring
  Eberhard Wolff, Interface21 Germany – very good speaker
  Comparison of different persistence approaches using spring templates for plain JDBC, iBatis and O/R-mappers like Hibernate; recommendation to use O/R-mappers with great care, especially if database-centric/relational concepts have to be considered (batch operations, stored procedures etc.).
• Keynote: The security development lifecycle at Microsoft
  Sebastian Weber, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  www.thedailywtf.com ;)
• Message-oriented architectures based on Spring
  Jürgen Höller, Interface21 – good speaker
  API-oriented approach outlining the differences between messaging and asynchronous execution; would have expected to see some example architectures, but there were “only” small source code examples; nevertheless an interesting topic
• Eclipse Code Camp Night
  Moderated by Wayne Beaton, Eclipse Foundation
  Some specific eclipse development problems were discussed ad-hoc; had some discussion with Wayne and Bernd Kolb about security in enterprise application clients based on RCP, but came to the conclusion that there is no project/proposal yet, unless I wrote one ;)