SDExpo 2007: Day in Review (3/23/07)

My SDExpo adventure came to a close today. Overall, this year’s sessions were really great and I thoroughly enjoyed the conference. I picked up a lot of great information related to Agile methodologies (Scrum, Crystal Clear, Lean) and plan on incorporating them into my studies (and eventually my practice).
Here’s a summary of the last few sessions I attended:
Developing Rich Domain Models
Chris Richardson, consultant and author of the book Pojos in Action, discussed how to implement a domain model using POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). I read Chris’ book late last year and overall was very satisified with it. In fact, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who wants to get an intro to peristence (Hibernate, JDO, Ibatis), Spring, and find out how to model their presentation and business tiers. Definitely fantastic! The session today covered many of the topcs from the book, and it was good to have this knowledge reinforced.
Benefits of the Build: A Case Study in Continuous Integration
Kirk Knoernschild, gave a great intro talk on the benefits of implementing continous integration. Here’s some more info:

Agile processes such as XP and RUP advocate continuous integration, where shorter iterations produce an incremental and functional growth of the system. The fundamental component of any continuous integration (CI) strategy is an automated and repeatable build. In addition to ensuring your application is always in a functional state, a robust build strategy enables a number of other important lifecycle activities.

War Stories: Fighter Jets and Agile Development at Lockheed Martin
Michael Zwicker, an Agile architect at Lockhead Martin gave a fantastic talk on how Agile methodologies were implemented at his company. This gives a shot in the arm to anybody who is hesistant about trying to go Agile. If it can work at Lockhead, a traditionally waterfall-heavy company, it can work in yours to. Other topics included key value expected and realized, barriers to initially implementing agile and how they were overcome, barriers to further agile adoption, and the value of training and agile tooling.
Michael also recommend an Agile tool that managed the project backlog: VersionOneHighlights of the day
* After lunch I decided to walk outside for a little bit. I discovered a trail right beside the conference center called the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and had a relaxing 45 minute walk.
* I discovered that the Hyatt right beside the convention center has a “Virtual Concierge” (I’m not kidding). Check out the link.