Busy times...

These are busy times, I need a lot of time just to keep my todo-list up-to-date. So Keeping up with IT is more Learning on the job at the moment.

Internationalisation

• Tomas Gustavsson from Karlstad University is coming over to give a workshop on Scrum, with the emphasis on starting up a project.
• A delegation of Fachgymnasium Papenburg is coming over to discuss whether our studies are interesting for their students.
• In March I'll go to Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid for a week to give some lectures on agile software development. I combine this with mentoring Hanzestudents who are doing their graduation work there (on the subject of Google wave).

Research
Research? Not really research yet in my opinion. I'm involved in the NOVO-project (see earlier posts) but at this point it's about system development. Requirements, use cases and architecture are starting for real now. The build team (Q3+Q4) will consist of 3 students and we'll be using Scrum.

Curriculum Development

• I'll need to update our 2nd year software engineering course with more multithreading because of the "multi-core revolution". Also, our strategy of intensifying the 1st year has led to material going from 2nd to 1st year. This creates room for some other topics!
  
• Software architecture will be added to our 4th year, a non-trivial job.

Accreditation
For the accreditation our institute will be visited by Hobeon in the fall. This means there's a lot of work for us to get ready.

Honours
I'm participating in the project group that's developing a honours course for excellent students. After some brainstorming we've got the right ideas. Now we have to see if we can match them with the 'guidelines' that came down from Hanze central.

And I still have a buildtool/continuous integration server on my wishlist. But I'm afraid it will have to wait some more...

Just a thought

We used to have the slogan De student centraal (The student is central, focus on the student, etc. ) Yesterday one of our eductational advisors said to me "That's history. A better way to put it is, Het leren van de student centraal" (The learning of the student is central.)

Don't ask your child what he (she) did today, ask him what he learned today :-)

Scrum Master

I just had two days of training on Scrum by the guru himself (Jeff Sutherland) and Serge Beaumont (Xebia). After doing XP for a while, I now can complement it with Scrum and have two legs to stand on ;-) I won't try to give a full account here what Scrum is, but it doesn't really cover the same stuff XP does. In one sentence you could say it's "extreme projectmanagement", or just "a framework for getting things done". The final goal is to get your team into "hyperproductive state".

The training was ok, I'd give it a 7.5/10. The material could have been presented a bit more structured (tell 'm what you're gonna tell 'm, then tell 'm, then tell 'm what you told them) but the content was ok. I appreciate the fact that they tried to support their story with data and referring to literature.

Completing this two day course (+exam) makes me a "Certified Scrum Master". After some more experience you can become a Certified Scrum Practitioner. Personally I would have switched those titles, but it's probably for historical reasons.

Already the next morning I noticed that I was unconsciously using some of the stuff. What's the business value of my wife opening the curtains when her goal is to get the kids to school on time? What's the business value of discussing a student who wants to enroll when he has missed the first 2.5 weeks of a quarter?
Let's keep this way of thinking and see if I can enter a hyperproductive state ;-)

Today was another edition of the JFall. I took the light version by skipping the keynotes and not trying to score every goodie there was to get. ;-) As it turned out my programme had a high "Google" percentage. Coincidence or is the influence of Google spreading ever more?

I started out with "How to introduce Agile in my organisation?" (Erwin vd Koogh, Xebia). No revolutionary insights but a few nice twists to remember. The magic formula is Action = Pain x Budget and developers have to learn a new language (Businessy).

After that I took the hands-on lab on Google Android by Siarhei (Sergei) Dudzin. This worked like a charm and in 1.5 hours I got the feeling for what it takes to develop an application for a Google Android phone. What strikes me is the perfect documentation that Google has as compared to your average open source project. Of course they have the budget, but they really put in the effort.

The next one was about "five star projects" (Eric Bouwers, Software Improvement Group). Apparently there now exists an official certification for software maintainability by the German company TÜVit. This certification ranges from 3 stars to 5 stars. 1 star is rubbage. The SIG performs the investigation for TÜVit. Just as in education the accreditation institution is also seperated from the investigating institution.
The speaker demonstrated the metrics on several open source projects.

Java and Google App engine (Jettro Coenradie, JTeam) was the poorest talk from my perspective. Too little concepts and too much code and XML flashing by. "This is easy, this is just as easy, this is almost too easy to show." Apparently he had some other audience in mind than me.

But this was compensated for by the last talk on Google Wave (Jos Dirksen, Atos Origin). I'm already "waving" but this talk showed me a lot more features. Most people (including myself) start by using it as email, but it can do so much more. The big question at the moment seems to be how you want to use it once you've explored the many features.
Jos also showed how to build your own bots and gadgets. I hope I will have some experimentation time soon!

The best way to keep up is to get some firsthand experience. That's why I will be involved in a project running within our researchgroup "New Business & ICT" (lector H. Velthuijsen).

The project aim is to deliver an expert system which will make life easier for Light Mentally Handicapped (LMH) people. This expert system is to be connected to all sorts of sensors within their homes and to be monitored by their attendants. If it works out well the LMH will need less interaction with their attendants, which gives the LMH a more normal life.

The client in the project is the NOVO foundation (www.novo.nl). Avics (www.avics.nl) is a market party involved with a lot of sensor/home automation expertise. The results will be open sourced.

My exact role will crystalize in a few weeks.

Google wave

Saturday I had a party with my family in-law. Serge asked me whether I'd heard of "google wave" already. My interest was peaked and I checked it out on sunday evening on wave.google.com. I watched the entire 1h20 video of the demo at the google i/o conference.

There are two things I'd like to mention. First of all, I found the presentation pretty amateuristic. The presentation was pretty mediocre at some parts and the jokes were not really funny. How can I teach my students that they have to prepare decent presentations when even google's people don't do it? And the excuse "it was just a developer release" would be an insult to developers, I think. So I would have appreciated a 15 minute version with most of the chatter cut out.

But then the thing itself. Google Wave is a "communication and collaboration tool". In short, they set out inventing email as if they were inventing it today with all the technology at hand. But to say Wave is email, is not correct. It's like a combination of email, instant messaging, blogging, a photo site, wiki all in one. It integrates with your blog and your social network. You can collaborate with multiple people (demo was four) on a piece of text in real-time. It has playback functionality like walking through a revision history in source control. Etc. etc.

Google also thought about federation. This means companies will be able to set up their own wave-server and create wave-accounts just like you can do with mail. And open sourcing it after creating open API's means developers will be able to create extensions for waves at several levels (i.e. at product or protocollevel).

So did google succeed in impressing me? Yes! (Despite the crummy presentation :-)

Yesterday I attended a NLJUG university session at Sun Amersfoort. Topic was Glassfish v3 which is coming soon. Glassfish is Sun's open source application server.
While most of the technical details went too deep for me (I'm not using this stuff on a daily basis) I tried to grasp the main line. For me it's the focus on the two stakeholders: developers and system managers. For the system managers clustering is pretty easy now and they also demo'd SNMP support. For the developers it's very handy that you can fix a bug, save the file and then test your webpage again without restarting the appserver and needing to recreate the testsituation. You just refresh the page and it all works, your entire session is kept intact.
But Java EE development is still pretty complex. How much emphasis should we put on all the tools and technical details as opposed to logic and creating maintainable applications?