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I should have mentioned yesterday that my colleague Xavier Warzee is attending AjaxWorld. He has already started reporting from the sessions he has been to.

Two of my colleagues are attending the JAOO conference in Denmark. I know they will be posting their thoughts on their blogs, so check them out:

• Sadek Drobi
• Julien Delhomme

This August, as I was vacationing in Malta, I grabbed Guns, Germs & Steel at a bookstore in the airport. It is a fascinating book that explains how the European civilization basically ended up dominating the rest of the world.
After completing it, I dived into Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, another captivating essay that tells how some companies manage to reach a inflection point where they start making a lot more money than their competitors, and never go back to their previous mediocrity.

What is most intriguing to me is the parallel that can be drawn between each of these books, and the facilitating technique of the Five Whys.

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One thing that we teach in Agile courses is estimating. One technique is taken from Steve McConnell and called Count, Compute, and Judge. The idea is that, to make an estimate, you have 3 options. First, if you can Count, do so (ie. do not do any estimate at all). Second, take a value that you know, then count it, then Compute the resulting value to obtain the estimate. Finally, if all else fails, use your Judgment. It is a good idea to mix compute & judge.In two recent instances, I have heard outrageous figures when talking with friends. One mentioned that “the average pregnancy age is 13 years old”. In a separate discussion, another asserted that “the price of baguette has increased 6-fold since the introduction of the euro”.

Obviously, in the context of this post, it sounds trivial that these sentences are nonsense. However, in the heat of the conversation, they can pass unnoticed. Both persons seemed actually convinced that they were true, and used them as proof to further the debate.

How often are we taking random figures at face value? (”we have estimated this project to cost this much”) We should always be at least critical.
The idea is to think of other things to judge the figure against (”the laws of economics would probably prevent the price of bread to increase so fast in such a short time”). Intuition helps, naturally.

“Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world” (Descartes). It seems that it is still not enough. Let’s keep in mind that others can be wrong, and that we ourselves can be wrong. Judging people and behavior is foolish, but judging data is not.

So, when hearing figures, always keep a critical mind, especially if this figure is used to take decisions. Conversely, do not show figures as hard facts. Be as honest as possible and make clear that “well, I heard this on the radio, but I might have misunderstood”. Giving a wide range of possible values helps too (”the most probable estimate is 1000 man-days, but plausible estimates range from 500 to 5000″). You’ll be helping others, and yourselves.

Today, I played a bit with Huckster, a presentation tool designed by James Gosling.

It’s intriguing: counter-intuitively, it does not have any kind of unique features (as you would expect from an outsider in the world of presentation tools). Its unique goal is to make it dead easy to create presentations; it is actually removing as many features as possible.

Indeed, it took me about 2 minutes to get my first presentation running.

Could you do that with PowerPoint? Sure you could. Except that you will probably fall into traps at some point: an ugly transition, a text positioned outside the slide and therefore invisible, or (God forbid) animations where elements of your slide appear one by one.

I like it. It goes in the same direction of something I read on the web recently (but cannot find anymore). The author said something of the lines of “instead of trying to get large projects to work, we should concentrate on trying to get smaller projects.”

It also helps avoid Death By PowerPoint. ;-)

Update (24/09/07): I should have mentioned that Google has included a presentation tool to their Google Docs. It is not as simple as Huckster, and it lacks the capacity to change the style of the presentation, making really hard to use in a professional context. I also regret that it is not as slick as PicasaWeb. Still, it is excellent for a first shot. And, you have the possibility to share the presentation live with other web users, as long as they are logged with their Google accounts (they’ll be able to see the slide you are looking at). Sounds like a nice replacement to Interwise, the system we’ve been using here at Valtech.

Quote from Agile Journal, in their Agile 2007 conference report: “The best leadership came from the large ISVs (e.g., Yahoo, Google, BMC Software) and the boutique consultants (e.g., Valtech) who make their living running worldwide software organizations and who have truly succeeded with Agile practices.”

On the projects I work on, I always try to introduce Maven. Unfortunately, it is often impossible to get approval for a separate machine to be used as a repository. For open source packages, that is not really a problem as they are available on the usual public repositories. But some are not, so I often end up using my workstation as the server. This is not very practical, as I often shut it down when I leave for a WE or for holidays.

Another option is to use a sub-directory of your maven project to be used as a crude repository for those packages. (more…)

The 3rd edition of the Valtech Days is taking place in Paris in October 23 & 24.

It is going to be a great edition (hey, I’m helping to organize it! ;-) ); I had confirmation that Laurent Bossavit and Régis Medina will be there, as well as Pascal Roques, and many others. Laurent will talk about “DIY Agile”, while Régis will expand on Refactoring, his pet topic. Pascal will discuss UML and Agile.

Other talks will focus on JBoss Seam, Spring, Agile & Offshore, Adobe Flex, the future of Web, Google APIs, SOA, XForms, Agitar Agitator, and Rally!

And that’s just the first day… on the second, an openspace technology event will take place, possibly the first such public event in France. Facilitation will be handled by yours truly. I hope that, experienced or not, all will be able to have their say, suggest topics to discuss, get together to talk, and get in touch with other members of the IT community (mostly Agile, if all goes well!).

OpenSpace Technology is now recognized as a fabulous way to harness energies and run productive meetings. It has been used in such conferences as CITCON, AgileOpen and the Agile conference series.

To learn more about OpenSpace Technology, see this explanation in French (translation is Forum Ouvert), or this one in English.

Come join us for these exciting 2 days!

On my current project, I am using Gienah as a way to integrate JUnit tests with Spring. I am rather pleased with the result, keeping my unit tests quite clean.

I just heard today about Unitils, a more ambitious tool. In addition to Spring, it supports TestNG, DbUnit, EasyMock, and Hibernate (ie. almost all that we are using here!). It also provides a number of additional services, such as helper asserts.

Especially intriguing are two things:

• they recommend temporarily removing some db constraints, and provide help to do so (”To keep database tests maintainable, test data files have to be as small as possible. (Referential) constraints however don’t help you to achieve this. We advise to disable all foreign key and not null constraints. Doing so makes it possible to specify only the data that matters for your test.“)
• they handle database versions is a way very similar to Ruby on Rails (”The database maintainer monitors a directory on the filesystem that contains DDL scripts for creating the structure of the database. The name of these scripts should comply with following naming convention: <version>_<some name>.sql. For example: 001_create_person_table.sql, 002_create_car_table.sql“)

See here for details.