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The word "agile" is used more and more, and everything around software development are supposed to be agile these days. Both Microsoft and IBM claim their new tools are "Agile", but didn't the agile manifesto say "people and interactions over process and tools"? The notion of expensive, feature-rich tooling vs ...

Last wednessday was the NL-JUG J-Spring 2008 conference, which is probably the biggest Java event in Holland by now. The event was packed with over 1100 visitors, but organized very well and everything went smooth. NL-JUG co-lead and collegue Bert Ertman was awarded the very prestigious Java Champion title which makes him the one of two Dutch ...

This blog entry is a combined piece of coverage for JavaPolis days 3, 4, and 5, in other words: The Conference. I have several reasons for doing this not in the least because of the very busy schedule and the bizarre problems I ran into with the wireless provider at the hotel. It appeared that the access that I bought from within my hotel room was ...

Evolving agileThe final day of JavaPolis already. The combination of a few too many beers at Thursday and lack of interesting sessions in the first slot made me skip the first session. The first session I visited today was about agile, presented by Scott Ambler. First of all Scott Ambler is an excellent speaker, so I enjoyed listening. The ...

Everybody agrees improving software development speed is a good thing. It's a simple math game: the benefit starts when the result is done. Also, software development resource costs are 99% people, and people are payed by the hour. So if you are done sooner, you get profit sooner and have to pay less hours. However, there is often no real ...

So, here we are again. Time flies. JavaPolis 2005 doesn't seem that long ago, but a year has passed since and I'm back for another edition of JavaPolis in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Antwerp isn't actually that far from where I live, a mere 200 km at most, but because I rather avoid the morning traffic jams on the city ring I ...

Henrik Kniberg has written a 90-page paper on his experiences using software development methods Scrum and XP in The Real World: "Scrum And XP from the trenches". The result is a very pragmatic, easy to read description about Scrum, without any religion, buzzword overuse or extreme dogmas. Just like I consider "RUP made easy" a ...

A recent presentation by Scott Ambler was posted as a podcast (audio file) on TheServerSide.com. Scott Ambler is a great speaker so you really don't need the slides. He starts out pretty fuzzy but after yelling a bit about the military and upper management Scott seems to get his groove and gives a great talk. :) He talks about some ''agile'' ...

I decided to write a short article based on my visit to the Javapolis talk by Kevlin Henny (yes, he does look just like the picture) and my visit to the circus. Curious? Read the article here.