iX-Conference on Better Software is over

I spent the last two days on the iX-conference on better software in cologne.
This conference had a different target audience than W-Jax where I have been last week.
Two highlights definitively have been the keynotes by Tom de Marco and Nilaus Wirth. De Marco was talking about why some companies are faster than others. Reasons are (amongst others) meetings that are held like ceremonies, intra company email spam or presentations that convey no information at all. He also identified the addiction to status reports as one of the retarding factors. All in all a very good presentation.
Niklaus Wirth, who became professor of computer science a year before I was even born, gave a retrospective of that time and about some values that have been lost. He clearly indicated that a (very) good formation is one of the ways to better sofware.

I my self had the luck to talk about tools that can help building better software, why this fails and what you can do about it. My boss was giving a talk about agile quality management and AspectQ.

One of the results of the many presentations is for me that the human factor is getting more and more important.

Nearly all tracks of the conference have been of high quality. Also the catering was good this time as oposed to last week. I am definitively looking forward to the next iX-Conference.

W-Jax is over

I've been the last two days at W-Jax conference in Munich. I only took a few sessions as I did quite some talking with conference participants. Overall it was quite interesting and I am sure that I will go to one of the next (W-)Jax conferences as well. In fact I just submitted some proposals for sessions on upcoming Jax in May 2006.

The sessions I participated in were

- EJB 3.0 by Oliver Ihns. At least parts of the presentation seemed to be based on the early draft and not of the public review version. So this might be confusing to some listeners.
- News in JBoss 5 (my own presentation)
- a few keynotes. In one of those, given by a tool vendor, there was the comparision between the software industry and the car industry with its assembly lines. 'd say, that this part of the development process has been solved in it as well. It just means putting software on cd and putting the cd into a nice little card box.
- a session on "why developers can't listen and domain guys can't develop" by two OOse gyus. This was a very good presentation about the needed soft skills in projets. Many projects don't fail because of technical reasons but e.g. because the developer is running in short through a bank where everyone is wearing a suit.
- (partially) in model driven software development by Markus Völter. Markus really has a clue about how to give good presentations. Also the content was very interesting. Unfortunately I had to run off to meet a client offsite.
- "How reliably is WS-reliability" by Marcel Tilly of Innoq. Well, this was hard stuff, but nevertheless interesting. The baseline was that if you want to use an upcoming standard in webservices, use it only if it is supported by IBM and/or Microsoft.

In total the atmosphere of the conference was good and there were intersting sessions and good food :-) The only real bad thing was that the hotel where the conference took place was not able to provide enough stuff to drink. And we are not talking about alcoholic beverages, but about soda water and coke etc.

Review of my JBoss book in c't magazine

German c't magazine has a review of my JBoss-Book in its current issue (24/2005) on page 228.

Upcoming speaking engagements

Hi,
I'll give presentations

• at W-Jax in Munic on 15.11.2005 14:30 on News in JBoss5
  
• at iX-Konferenz in Cologne on "Better software quality through tools". This is on 22.11.2005 17:25 (see http://www.ix-konferenz.de/showabstract.php?vid=481&stylesheet=style/konf0502.php)
  
• FH Rosenheim on 14.12.2005