Schedule:
5:30 – 6:00 PM Pizza and Networking6:00 – 7:00 PM Maven 3 VS Maven 2 – new features7:00 – 7:10 PM Short break7:10 – 7:15 PM Announcements7:15 – 8:45 PM Decision Making
Featured Talk / Main Session
Decision MakingAlistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at conferences like No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We’ll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We’ll learn how a team can fall into decision-making dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We’ll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide.
Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.
About the Speaker:Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.
His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at user groups in the United States, and helps lead IASA Denver and the Denver Open Source User Group. He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O’Reilly), due out in 2010.
He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.
Basic Concepts Talk / First Session
Maven 3 VS Maven 2 – new features of Maven 3Explore what’s new on the cutting edge release of Maven, version 3.0. We’ll explore the performance improvements, features that make debugging Maven issues easier, and changes to POMs that may require modifications to your build, but will result in more determinate build outputs.
About the Speaker:Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O’Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.