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Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.

This can be a dynamic discussion where challenges facing attendees may have us to focus on some areas and tips of agile development. We will certainly talk about how team or management choices to deviate from core agile practices add risk to a project with suggestions on how to resolve many of these challenges.

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Of all the non-functional requirements of software development, complexity receives the least attention and seems to be the most important from a long term standard point. This talk will look at some of forces that drive complexity at the code level and at a system level and their impact. We will discuss what causes us to over look complexity, how our perception of it changes over time and what we can do about it?

In this session we will break down the meaning of complexity and simplicity and measure the application of those means against the common software development dogma. Looking at common development trends and pressures, we'll discuss where simplify does and doesn't help. We will examine areas of development which at first glance seem to be simple (such as the creation of an equals method in Java), that end up being difficult or impossible based on normal constraints. We will example the drivers of complexity with some discussion on what you can do about it. This session will finish with a discussion around several challenges to high scale software architectures and how to keep it simple.

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When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.

This session will look at a number of security concerns and how the ESAPI library provides a unified solution for security. This includes authorization, authentication of services, encoding, encrypting, and validation. This session will discuss a number of issues which can be solved through standardizing on the open source Enterprise Security API.

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For decades object-oriented programming has been sold (perhaps over sold) as the logical programming paradigm which provides “the way" to software reuse and reductions in the cost of software maintenance as if it comes for free with the simple selection of the an OO language. Even with the renewed interests in functional languages, the majority of development shops are predominately using object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, and Ruby. So most likely you are using an OO language… How is that reuse thing going? Is your organization realizing all the promises? Even as a former Rational Instructor of OOAD and a long time practitioner, I find great value in returning to the basics. This session is a return to object-oriented basics.

This session is intended to balance the often-touted theoretical object-oriented practices with lessons from the real world. The session will start with a review of some of the basics regarding abstractions and encapsulation. Although simple concepts, we will push the boundary of how these techniques are applied. We will discuss the difference between analysis and design and how that is reflected in our code. We will also look at the limitations of Java the language as outlined in Josh Block’s book “Effective Java”. The session will go past the basics of object-oriented principles and into what our true goals of development really are.

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The agile focus of software development puts heavy focus on user requirements through user stories. However we can not lose sight of the non-functional requirements as well. The software could be written to the exact specification and desire of the user, however if it takes 5 minutes for a request response, or it only supports 2 users or it isn't secure, then we still haven't done our jobs as developers.

This session will focus on the non-functional requirements of software development, namely: Performance, Scalability, Security, and Software Monitoring and Management. Each subject area discussion will include, goals, design practices, tools, and where it fits in the software development life-cycle.