Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because “it works on my machine”? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?

In this session we will talk about some tried and true favorites like Ant, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse, cover tools like diff, patch, difftools, and diffj for teasing apart changesets, and talk about measuring and managing complexity with tools like cobertura, JavaNCSS, XRadar, CodeStriker, and Jupiter. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you and your team, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your team's development processes.